Linguapax perspective on a pax linguistica

Linguapax was invited to participate in the seminar, ‘Language Policy and the Promotion of Peace’, held at the University of Osnabrück, by Visiting Professor Neville Alexander, a member of the Linguapax Advisory Board. We are most grateful to have had the opportunity to contribute to this debate and to add some words to the present volume from the particular perspective of Linguapax's work. Linguapax is a non-governmental organisation based in Barcelona, in the framework of the Unesco Centre of Catalonia, and dedicated to rallying linguistic communities worldwide around the belief that the preservation and revitalisation of language diversity is inseparable from a genuine sense of such big programmatic words as (mature) democracy, (meaningful) peace and (truly multi-directional) intercultural understanding. In the context of Linguapax's work, peace is conceived as ranging from its more explicit sense, as framed by the assumptions held by International Law, to the less definite, and in fact, and as yet, not fully charted waters, of cultural peace. Two major ways of action were designed to this end from the beginning: assessing linguistic policies and promoting community-based linguistic revitalisation projects.

Framed by these goals, Linguapax engages in a process of permanent questioning driven by the multiple and diverse voices coming from its international network of delegations and Advisory Board. How to develop the tools to work in the crossroads between a meaningful sense of peace and the policies for linguistic diversity translates into being able to look at and trying to think about some pending questions. A few of these questions are:

How do we harness and articulate the whole potential inherent in the multifaceted linguistic diversity (diversity of languages [a controversial construct itself], of communication ethoi, of linguistic ideologies)? From which institutional locus should language policies be designed in order not to neglect the diverse ways not only to conceive but also to experience language and the peace potential of spontaneous language ecologies? Is diversity perceived in the same way by its ‘target beneficiaries’ as its planners do?

To what extent would it be necessary to face and include the fact that classical anthropological categories, not to mention the political ones that ground, more often than not, the planners’ classical idea of diversity are actually being transformed and even becoming obsolete through globalisation and deterritorialisation?