Language Rights and the Law in Scandinavia

“Eduardo Faingold is widely known as an expert on constitutional and legal guarantees of minority language rights across the world. In turning to Scandinavia he is examining countries traditionally sympathetic to minority rights, thereby providing potential models for other countries but also laying bare possible gaps between guarantees on the one hand and practice on the other. This is an important addition to the literature on language policy and language rights.” —Humphrey Tonkin, University of Hartford, USA “There are few academics who have contributed as much to the growing body of scholarship on issues of language rights than has Eduardo Faingold. This volume, concerned with issues of language rights in Scandinavia, constitutes an important and valuable addition to the literature in the field. Faingold’s insights are clear, cogent, and powerful, and will be of interest to those working in a variety of areas, including not only language policy studies, language planning, and language rights, but also minority and ethnic studies, and of course Scandinavian studies.” —Timothy Reagan, University of Maine, USA/University of the Free State, South Africa This book examines the language policies in the constitutions, legal statutes, and regulations of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland. In these countries and territories, modern descendants of Old Norse (North Germanic) are spoken today: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese. In addition, there are regions of Scandinavia where speakers of minority languages were conquered or incorporated, with their languages suppressed or neglected, as well as recent developments in the status and use of English, and immigrant populations who do not speak a Scandinavian language as their native language. This book adopts a comparative approach to trace the development of language policies and rights in Scandinavia, and it will beof interest to students as well as scholars of European and Scandinavian studies, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, education, political science, and law. Eduardo D. Faingold is Professor of Spanish and linguistics at the University of Tulsa, USA.