Positionality and Methodology
To situate this article, I write as a proud Boarisch-Schwob (Original Nations/Fourth World Indigenous Nations) scholar and community member whose ancestral languages, Boarisch (Bavarian) and Schwäbisch (Swabian), remain unrecognized within German and European language-protection frameworks.Footnote 1 This positionality gives me a direct stake in the language-classification practices examined in this article and shapes my engagement with United Nations cultural and human rights mechanisms. I understand Boarisch-Schwob peoplehood through a Fourth World Indigenous framework grounded in historical continuity, ancestral sovereignty, cultural distinctiveness, homeland, language, and self-identification.Footnote 2
This article proceeds from a situated Boarisch-Schwob standpoint, informed by Indigenous standpoint scholarship.Footnote 3 Its Boarisch-Schwob grounding also draws on sociolinguistic research demonstrating that the examined language–dialect distinction is socially and politically constituted, and that historically rooted language functions as a marker of collective identity, cultural survival, belonging, and speaker-defined Weltanschauungen (worldviews).Footnote 4 This standpoint is not understood here as epistemic authority automatically conferred by identity but as a reflexive location from which to examine the social relations and knowledge structures through which Boarisch and Schwäbisch are classified. Accordingly, the article adopts a reflexive, advocacy-informed methodology combining legal and policy analysis with situated engagement in international cultural and human rights processes.Footnote 5 It draws on linguistic Gutachten (expert reports), European and United Nations cultural and human rights frameworks, Fourth World scholarship, and written submissions made to United Nations mechanisms in 2025 and 2026. Rather than treating language classification as a neutral technical exercise, the analysis examines how administrative categories determine cultural visibility, institutional protection, and opportunities for public participation.
Introduction
In April 2026, the United Nations Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, Ms Alexandra Xanthaki, launched a global call for inputs on how cultural rights should be assessed and measured.Footnote 6 The initiative asks a deceptively simple question: how do we know whether cultural rights are genuinely being implemented? Yet this question reveals a deeper structural problem within cultural and human rights governance. Many ethnoculturally distinct peoples in Europe remain effectively invisible because cultural and human rights frameworks often develop from already recognized State categories of culture, identity, and language.Footnote 7
This article examines that problem through the example of Boarisch and Schwäbisch, historically rooted languages spoken by the Boarisch and Schwob Peoples in what is now southern Germany. Although both languages possess long written traditions, distinct grammatical systems, international classification as distinct languages, and deep cultural continuity, German authorities continue to classify them as mere Mundarten (“dialects”). The article argues that the language–dialect distinction is not a neutral technical classification but a form of political–cultural governance and assimilation strategy that determines which peoples become institutionally visible and eligible for protection.Footnote 8
The consequences are substantial. Linguistic classification directly shapes access to education, cultural participation, public funding, institutional support, intergenerational transmission, self-identification, and cultural integrity.Footnote 9 Linguistic classification is especially important under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML, or the Charter). Germany recognizes Danish, Frisian, Sorbian, Romani, and Plattdeutsch (Low German) under the Charter, while Boarisch and Schwäbisch remain excluded despite substantial linguistic evidence supporting their distinctiveness and autonomy.Footnote 10 The classification between “language” and “dialect” therefore operates as a gatekeeping and cultural erasure mechanism: It renders the Boarisch and Schwob Peoples largely invisible within German and European language-protection frameworks and contributes to the erosion of their languages, distinct Weltanschauungen (worldviews), and cultural continuity. Such processes have also been conceptualized as forms of structural linguistic genocide, or linguicide.Footnote 11
The analysis proceeds in five parts. First, the article examines the linguistic Gutachten (expert reports) and international classifications supporting the status of Boarisch and Schwäbisch as distinct, historically rooted languages. Second, the work considers language as a vessel of peoplehood, identity, memory, and relationships with the homeland. Third, it situates these concerns within the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s (UNESCO’s) MONDIACULT and living heritage frameworks. Fourth, the article uses Fourth World Indigenous theory to situate the Boarisch-Schwob experience within broader patterns of internal colonization, assimilation, and cultural invisibility in Europe. Finally, the work examines how bureaucratic nonrecognition affects education, participation, data collection, and the measurement of cultural and human rights implementation – and proposes indicators to identify such structural exclusion. Although centered on the Boarisch and Schwob Peoples, the analysis has wider significance for ethnoculturally distinct peoples and linguistic minorities whose cultural and human rights remain conditioned by State-created classifications that deny or obscure their existence, languages, and lived realities.Footnote 12
Gutachten: Evidence of linguistic autonomy and historical continuity
Recent linguistic Gutachten (expert reports) converge on a central conclusion: Boarisch and Schwäbisch are not informal offshoots of standard German but historically developed linguistic systems with their own structural and literary traditions. Anthony Rowley explains that Boarisch and Schwäbisch-Alemannisch developed independently from modern standard German and possess distinct grammars, vocabularies, and historical written forms. He further observes that the linguistic distance between Boarisch and standard German is greater than that between several other recognized European languages, such as Danish and Norwegian or Czech and Slovak.Footnote 13
Hannes Scheutz reaches a similar conclusion. He traces Boarisch to the Old High German period around AD 800, when it functioned as a Stammessprache (Original Nation language, or stem/tribal language) centuries before the gradual emergence of modern standard German. On this account, Boarisch is not a degraded or informal form of the official German language but an autonomous Indigenous language whose grammatical, lexical, phonological, and written continuity remains identifiable today.Footnote 14
The reports also document substantial structural linguistic autonomy. Alfred Wildfeuer and Nicole Eller-Wildfeuer identify distinct vocabulary, grammatical structures, phonological systems, and centuries of literary production. They further note that the linguistic distance between Boarisch and standard German is comparable to, or greater than, that between other officially recognized European languages, including Norwegian and Swedish.Footnote 15 Klaus Wolf adds that Boarisch and Schwäbisch possess grammars, dictionaries, anthologies, and longstanding literary traditions, with no meaningful difference between their degree of codification and documentation and that of Plattdeutsch (Low German), which already receives protection under the ECRML.Footnote 16 Mechthild Habermann likewise supports their recognition on linguistic, cultural, and sociological grounds, emphasizing the immense pressure that institutional standard German places on Indigenous languages spoken across what is now southern Germany.Footnote 17
This evidence directly challenges the administrative premise on which linguistic exclusion within Germany and Europe rests. The ECRML excludes dialects of an official language, but these reports demonstrate that Boarisch and Schwäbisch are historically autonomous languages rather than derivatives of standard German. Indeed, international linguistic and cultural classifications reinforce this conclusion: ISO 639-3 assigns the codes “bar” to Boarisch and “swg” to Schwäbisch; both are listed in Glottolog and Ethnologue; and UNESCO has identified Bavarian and Alemannic, which encompasses Schwäbisch language varieties, as endangered languages.Footnote 18 Therefore, the central problem is not a lack of linguistic evidence, but the continued refusal of recognition within Germany and Europe.
Language as the vessel of peoplehood
The linguistic marginalization and assimilation experienced by the Boarisch and Schwob Peoples extend far beyond language alone. Language is not merely a means of communication; it carries Weltanschauungen (worldviews), collective memory, identity, intergenerational knowledge, responsibility, and relationships with the homeland and kin. As Special Rapporteur José Martínez Cobo observed, “each language reflects a particular way of seeing things and the world.”Footnote 19 Germany’s structural linguistic genocide therefore affects not only Boarisch and Schwob linguistic and cultural expression but also participation in cultural life, access to heritage and knowledge systems, and the transmission of collective identity across generations.
For historically continuous and culturally distinct peoples, language is not simply one cultural attribute among others; it is one of the interdependent foundations of peoplehood.Footnote 20 It is an innate part of who we are, shaping the responsibilities and knowledge we carry across generations. The Boarisch and Schwob Peoples have historically been understood as Altstämme (Original Nations, or ancient stems/tribes), later emerging as Stammesherzogtümer (stem/tribal duchies), with Bavaria developing into an independent kingdom before being enclosed by the German Empire. Contemporary political and Fourth World scholarship has additionally described Bavaria as a Fourth World Indigenous Nation and a stateless nation.Footnote 21 Bavaria’s recorded political history extends over 1,500 years, making it one of the oldest continuous polities in Europe, with Boarisch possessing more than 1,300 years of linguistic continuity.Footnote 22
For the Boarisch and Schwob Peoples, language consequently remains a marker of belonging, persistence, and cultural integrity. The formulation that “the true homeland is language; when one abandons the language, one abandons the homeland” expresses more than regional attachment.Footnote 23 It captures an enduring form of self-identification grounded in language, Ursprung (“springing forth” or origin), and ethnocultural survival. The loss of language is thus not merely the disappearance of words; it weakens the relationships through which an Altstamm (Original Nation) understands itself, remembers its past, and transmits its worldview to future generations.Footnote 24
MONDIACULT: Global cultural policy and living heritage
UNESCO frameworks have repeatedly recognized the importance of linguistic and cultural diversity to humanity’s shared heritage. One such framework is the World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development (MONDIACULT).
MONDIACULT is described as the world’s largest cultural policy conference and the foremost global platform for dialogue and cooperation on cultural policies. It is a ministerial forum through which UNESCO’s 194 Member States work together to establish and commit to the global cultural agenda. The third conference, held in 2025, brought together more than 2,500 participants from 163 countries. This scale matters because MONDIACULT does not merely facilitate discussion of culture; it shapes the international policy commitments against which State action as well as cultural and human rights implementation may be assessed.Footnote 25
Since the first MONDIACULT conference in 1982, the process has recognized cultural and linguistic diversity as foundational to human dignity and development. The 1982 Mexico City Declaration affirmed that every culture constitutes a “unique and irreplaceable body of values,” while the conference’s final report warned against cultural homogenization and identified language as a primary vehicle through which peoples express their visions of the world.Footnote 26 The second conference in 2022 and the resulting UNESCO MONDIACULT Declaration recognized culture as a global public good and called for MONDIACULT to become a regular ministerial process. The 2025 MONDIACULT Outcome Document went further by framing cultural rights as human rights and calling for the safeguarding of cultural and linguistic diversity, with particular recognition of the cultures and languages of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, minorities, and vulnerable groups.Footnote 27
These commitments are directly relevant to Boarisch and Schwäbisch. As forms of living and intangible cultural heritage, their erosion affects not only communication but also collective memory, social practices, intergenerational knowledge systems, and relationships with the homeland. UNESCO has similarly emphasized that the loss of Indigenous languages entails the disappearance of oral traditions, cultural values, knowledge systems, and relationships with the natural world.Footnote 28 Yet such commitments remain incomplete where State language classifications exclude ethnoculturally distinct peoples. In practice, administrative recognition determines whose language and cultural realities become visible within the global cultural agenda.
The MONDIACULT 2025 poster reproduced in Figure 1 identified the author as “Boarisch-Schwob, Altstämme (Original Nations), Germany.” Its significance lies not merely in personal representation but in making otherwise unrecognized European Original Nations visible within the world’s foremost cultural policy forum.
MONDIACULT 2025 poster identifying the author as “Boarisch-Schwob, Altstämme (Original Nations), Germany.” Source: Australia ICOMOS 2025.
Figure 1 Long description
The MONDIACULT 2025 poster is headed “The Living Heritage / Living the Heritage: Community Voices and Expert Dialogues for a Resilient Future.” It presents the ICOMOS Indigenous Heritage Working Group through text, portraits and statements. Purple lines connect Simon Kieser’s profile to an enlarged panel on the right. Beneath his photograph, he is identified as “Boarisch-Schwob, Altstämme (Original Nations), Germany.” His statement reads: “Indigenous heritage carries a deep-time understanding of how people and landscapes co-exist. Protecting Indigenous languages, traditions, and knowledge systems is not only about cultural survival and Indigenous Peoples’ rights — it is about sustaining diverse ways of knowing and living that are vital for a resilient and just future.” Photographs and organisational logos run along the bottom.
Fourth World Indigenous theory and Europe’s internal colonization
The Boarisch-Schwob case also illustrates a broader structural issue within Fourth World Indigenous theory: Historically continuous and ethnoculturally distinct peoples in Europe continue to experience cultural, human rights, and linguistic marginalization and assimilation despite their incorporation within democratic States. As political geographer Richard Griggs observed, many Indigenous nations in Europe have become “forgotten or discarded” because dominant, harmful, and ill-informed understandings of Indigeneity have often been confined to overseas colonial contexts.Footnote 29
As Griggs explains:
The ancient nations from which the patchwork quilt of [S]tates was stitched have no internationally recognised sovereignty, but their geopolitical force through self- determination movements is challenging the entire [S]tate system. Thus, a new term has developed since the 1970s, the Fourth World.
… prejudices and misconceptions regarding the terms “[A]boriginal” and “[I]ndigenous” abound including an exclusive association with New World “Indians.” In this manner, many [I]ndigenous nations in Europe … such as Wales, Catalonia, Brittany, Flanders, Bavaria … and hundreds more are forgotten or discarded.Footnote 30 This is particularly unfortunate in the case of Europe because so much can be learned from examining the experience of Fourth World nations at the core of the European-derived system of [S]tates.
A convenient shorthand for the Fourth World would be internationally unrecognised nations. These are the 5,000 to 6,000 nations representing a third of the world’s population whose descendants maintain a distinct political culture within the [S]tates which claim their territories. In all case, the Fourth World nation is engaged in a struggle to maintain or gain some degree of sovereignty over their national homeland.Footnote 31
This invisibility is not merely terminological. Once an Indigenous nation is classified as a regional population within a modern State, its language can be treated as a dialect, its peoplehood reduced to folklore, and its claims confined to domestic cultural policy rather than understood as questions of collective rights and self-determination.
Importantly, the Boarisch-Schwob experience is not identical to the histories of Indigenous Peoples in overseas “New World” settler-colonial contexts, nor does Fourth World theory require such equivalence. Its analytical value lies in identifying a shared structural condition: Historically continuous and ethnoculturally distinct peoples may survive political incorporation and cultural assimilation within modern States while remaining unrecognized as peoples. In the Boarisch-Schwob context, structural linguistic genocide forms part of a broader process of internal colonization through which State-centered classifications render enduring Altstämme (Original Nations) visible only as “regional cultures” but invisible as ethnoculturally distinct peoples possessing historical continuity, ancestral sovereignty, and a collective right to self-determination.Footnote 32
Bureaucratic invisibility and cultural rights indicators
Despite prior engagement with United Nations mechanisms on these issues, including a 2025 submission to the Special Rapporteur on the right to development, Mr. Surya Deva, such forms of linguistic erasure and cultural assimilation remain largely invisible in international reporting.Footnote 33 For example, while the Special Rapporteur’s preliminary observations following his 2025 country visit to Germany acknowledged the distinct cultural and linguistic identity asserted by persons with hearing impairments and deaf persons – and emphasized the importance of sign language – comparable attention is not given to ethnoculturally distinct peoples whose languages remain unrecognized within State frameworks.Footnote 34
As Special Rapporteur Deva noted:
These persons consider that they have a distinct cultural and linguistic identity and advocate that sign language should be recognised as a minority language. I urge the Government to ensure that enough teachers are trained to teach sign language … – this is essential to realise their right to development.Footnote 35
Yet neither the preliminary observations nor the final report addresses the Boarisch-Schwob Peoples or our languages, despite our longstanding cultural and linguistic continuity and decades of advocacy for recognition. The final report nevertheless discusses Germany’s minority languages, stating that “Danish, Frisian, Sorbian and Romani are official minority languages.”Footnote 36 Given the Special Rapporteur’s attention to “distinct cultural and linguistic identity,” language education, and the right to development, why do our Peoples, our languages, and our collective right to development remain invisible in his reporting?
Indeed, the consequences of nonrecognition are practical and ongoing. Boarisch and Schwäbisch receive limited institutional support within formal education, weakening intergenerational transmission and reinforcing longstanding stigma and racism surrounding nonstandard language use.Footnote 37 Their exclusion from the ECRML also places them outside the Charter’s formal monitoring and protection framework, despite the linguistic evidence supporting their autonomy as distinct, historically rooted languages.
Nonrecognition additionally creates an implementation assessment problem. Cultural and human rights indicators typically operate through categories already recognized by States and institutions. Where a historically rooted language is classified as a dialect rather than a language, its condition may remain unassessed altogether. The absence of data can therefore reflect not the absence of cultural and human rights harm but the classificatory framework through which cultural and human rights are measured.
These issues are directly relevant to the Special Rapporteur Xanthaki’s 2026 study on assessing the implementation of cultural rights.Footnote 38 The author argues that existing cultural rights indicators should be expanded to examine: (1) whether ethnoculturally distinct peoples and linguistic minorities are formally recognized within State frameworks; (2) whether intergenerational language transmission is strengthening or declining; (3) whether affected ethnoculturally distinct peoples and linguistic minorities exercise meaningful influence over decisions concerning their cultural futures; (4) whether public institutions support traditional languages in education, media, and cultural life; and (5) whether administrative classifications themselves produce exclusion. Cultural rights indicators should also distinguish symbolic participation from participation that meaningfully affects authority, resources, and decision making.
Culturally adequate participation cannot occur where ethnoculturally distinct peoples are required to engage solely through externally imposed linguistic and administrative categories that deny or marginalize their own forms of identification and cultural expression. Implementing cultural and human rights requires more than measuring access to existing rights frameworks. It requires examining whether the classifications underlying those frameworks and institutions make ethnoculturally distinct peoples and their languages visible in the first place – and on their own terms.
Conclusion
The Boarisch-Schwob experience demonstrates how cultural and human rights may formally exist while remaining inaccessible in practice. Linguistic classification is not merely descriptive: It determines visibility, eligibility for protection, and access to institutional support. When a historically rooted language is administratively reduced to a dialect, the peoples whose memory, Weltanschauungen (worldviews), and cultural continuity it carries may likewise be rendered invisible within education, heritage policy, and international reporting.
The significance of this analysis extends beyond the Boarisch and Schwob Peoples. Ethnoculturally distinct peoples and linguistic minorities across Europe may remain unprotected because State-created classifications determine whose language counts, whose peoplehood becomes visible, and whose heritage is worth acknowledging. Meaningful cultural rights implementation therefore requires cultural and human rights governance systems capable not only of protecting recognized diversity but also of identifying and correcting the classifications that have rendered Europe’s ethnoculturally distinct peoples and historically rooted languages invisible.
Miar blaibet miar.
Miar schwäzat unsa Schproch.Footnote 39
Acknowledgments
I acknowledge and pay my respects to Taranaki Whānui ki Te Upoko o Te Ika, the tangata whenua and mana whenua of the lands on which I live and work. I thank the University of Sydney’s Indigenous Research Hub on Gadigal Country for supporting my work on the protection and resurgence of the Boarisch and Schwob languages.
A sakrischs Dankschee to Dr. Fiona Campbell, Aunty Professor Jakelin Troy (Ngarigu Elder), the anonymous reviewers, and the editorial team at the International Journal of Cultural Property (IJCP) for their insightful feedback, guidance, and support. My sincere gratitude to the IJCP and Cambridge University Press for providing a vital platform for public truth-talk that makes invisible peoples visible.
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