Language rights and language policy are significant issues in contemporary politics and have become an important subject for political theorists today. Yet until now, there has been no major work or edited volume dealing with language rights from the standpoint of normative political theory. Will Kymlicka and Alan Patten have put together a volume of essays to remedy this situation. According to the editors of this valuable collection, linguistic diversity has emerged as a major source of controversy in a number of distinct political contexts. In their comprehensive introduction to the topic, and the volume, they identify these contexts as including at least five areas: Eastern Europe, regional languages/minority nationalisms, immigrant integration, European Union/transnational democracy, and indigenous languages/biodiversity. As political theorists in recent years have explored ideas of citizenship, nationhood, multiculturalism, and deliberative democracy, it has become increasingly evident, they say, that political theories often rest on presuppositions about people's language repertoires. It is important that these presuppositions, and their implications, be explored and subjected to critical scrutiny. The aim of this collection is to do precisely this. In the end, it is entirely successful in its ambitions. The chapters are of high quality and deal with issues that are important. Anyone presently interested in working on language rights in political theory should begin here.

There are 13 essays in Language Rights and Political Theory, all of them worthy of discussion. The following merit special mention, at least because they offer theses that are particularly challenging. Philippe Van Parjis's essay, “Linguistic Justice,” asks us to consider a case for subsidized language training, arguing that native speakers of dominant languages have an advantage over those who have to learn a second. Particularly in a world in which English is the lingua franca, there is, according to Van Parjis, a case for native speakers of English subsidizing those who would remain at a disadvantage without the linguistic tool that dominates world politics, commerce, and scholarship. The case is made by assuming at the outset that differences in the costs borne by some groups to gain benefits all should be able to enjoy have to be justified: Those lucky enough to be born into families speaking a dominant language have no automatic entitlement to the advantages that brings. For Van Parjis, linguistic justice demands that the linguistically rich compensate the linguistically poor—preferably with cash transfers (p. 168).

I have two observations. First, it is not clear why linguistic inequality needs to be singled out as a basis for justifying wealth transfers. Given that it is only one variable that impacts upon inequality more generally, if one wants to justify redistributing wealth, why complicate matters by isolating this particular asset or talent for separate calculation? Is a surfboard rider entitled to get any more money if his mother tongue is Korean? Second, if there is a case for addressing linguistic inequality as a problem of distributive justice, or of what Van Parjis calls “cooperative justice” (pp. 154–56), perhaps there are other inequalities that should also be addressed in similar fashion. For example, people who do not get skin cancer produce a public good insofar as they do not require expensive medical treatment that could be a drain on health-care expenditures—they keep either our taxes or our health insurance premiums lower. Yet those with dark skin are much less likely to get skin cancer because of the advantages their pigmentation brings, while those who have white skin have to spend money on sunblock, hats, and extra clothing—or air-conditioning if they are forced to stay indoors on sunny days—to contribute to this public good. Should hats, air-conditioning, and sunblock be subsidized to deal with this injustice; or should we establish a system of cash transfers from blacks to whites? Does the case against doing this rest on the fact that the transfers involved would be trivial, or is the whole idea of continually extending the scope of distributive, or cooperative, justice simply absurd?

Van Parjis's argument also relies upon an assumption that is controversial, and which sparked substantial controversy among some other essayists in the volume. This is the assumption that having to learn a second language is a liability, rather than an asset. On this question, Stephen May's essay, “Misconceiving Minority Language Rights,” takes issue with the arguments of Thomas Pogge (“The Rights of Hispanics in the US”) and David Laitin and Robert Reich (“A Liberal Democratic Approach to Language Rights”). Pogge, for example, argues that any support for teaching Spanish in U.S. schools must be constrained by “an overriding commitment to the interests of the children that our schools are supposed to educate” (p. 121), and that this means promoting English first. Along with Laitin and Reich, Pogge is concerned that speaking English is the key to social mobility, and that encouraging minority languages disadvantages children who will grow up less proficient in the language of mobility. Yet, as May points out, it does not look as though African Americans have found that speaking English for 200 years have kept them out of urban ghettos. Equally, the advantages of bilingualism are all too often overlooked by theorists, even though most universities seem to recognize the benefits of having a second language in insisting that their students devote some attention to acquiring knowledge of a foreign tongue. (If this point is sound, and we admit how badly most English-speaking university students learn other languages, then perhaps should native speakers of English be compensated for being deprived of the incentive that will ensure that they learn a second language?)

These discussions make for only a small sample of the many problems addressed and arguments developed by the essays in this excellent collection. While all the chapters may be read with profit, I would make special mention of a few others. Idil Boran's “Global Linguistic Diversity, Public Goods, and the Principle of Fairness” offers an acute analysis of the way in which the conceptualization of linguistic justice bears on arguments for the protection of linguistic diversity. Jacob Levy's “Language, Literacy and the State” provides a characteristically insightful assessment of the problem of minority language protection, considered in light of the very different imperative to protect minority speakers. And Alan Patten's “What Kind of Bilingualism?” is an especially instructive essay on the strengths and weaknesses of two alternative understandings of language rights, one attaching rights to persons and the other to territories. Finally, the long introduction to the volume written by the editors is itself a masterful survey of the field.