Securing the right to assimilate: How the drafting of the genocide convention helped undermine language rights

Abstract: This article focuses broadly on the problem of global language loss, and the underlying political dynamics that drive it. Noting that the United Nations currently promotes a rights-based approach to addressing this problem, I explore why language rights mechanisms are currently weak and fragmented. To do this, I focus on the tensions that exist between language rights and the sovereign rights claimed by states, based on a genealogical analysis of the drafting of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Specifically, I examine why many drafters wanted to exclude protections for languages and linguistic minorities from the convention. My detailed narrative reconstruction shows that drafters removed consideration of languages from the convention in order to assert states’ rights to promote national languages, assimilate minorities, and prevent outside influence in domestic affairs. The article concludes by making suggestions for further research to deepen our understanding of the connections between sovereignty and language rights, while also arguing that effective solutions to the global crisis of language loss require the creation of a more robust language rights regime that acknowledges and confronts the implicit rights that states claim for themselves.