Managing linguistic nationalism through constitutional design: Lessons from South Asia
* Of the Board of Editors; Faculty of Law and Department of Political Science, University of Toronto. An earlier draft was presented at the Symposium on Constitutional Design, held at the University of Texas School of Law, in January 2009 and at the Conference on Comparative Constitutional Traditions in South Asia, National University of Singapore, in June 2009. I thank Bill Eskridge, John Ferejohn, Sunil Khilnani, Karen Knop, Sandy Levinson, Peter Ordeshook, Ira Parghi, Rick Pildes, Arun Thiruvengadam, and Ernie Young for helpful questions and comments. For research assistance, I thank Nathan Hume. Email: sujit.choudhry{at}utoronto.ca
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Abstract |
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How should constitutional design respond to competing claims for official language status in countries where there is more than one language, whose speakers are concentrated in a specific territory, and hence, where more than one language is a plausible candidate for use in public services, public education, legislatures, the courts, and public administration? This is one of the most pervasive and pressing constitutional problems of modern political life. It has been largely ignored in the literatures on comparative constitutional law and constitutional design. This article therefore turns to constitutional practice, and focuses on South Asia, where linguistic nationalism has been one of the principal forces shaping constitutional developments for over sixty years. South Asia has been a constitutional laboratory on questions of linguistic nationalism, and vividly illustrates both that it is possible to manage linguistic nationalism through constitutional design, and conversely, that the cost of getting official-language policy wrong can be very high.