Who owns language? Mother tongues as intellectual property and the conceptualization of human linguistic diversity

Abstract

This paper considers a number of perspectives on the notion of ownership of language and languages. It argues that from the point of view of law and legal theory there is no reason in principle why a language cannot be owned. Two conceptualizations of language ownership are discussed. The first is the ‘liberal’ view, which sees language as an open-access unstructured space. This is publicly or collectively owned in the sense that it is ‘non-property’. The second is the mother tongue–native speaker model, which views language as the property of the ethnos, and understands it as highly structured, relatively closed space, to which native speakers have privileged access. On the ‘liberal view’, it would be wrong in principle to ‘enclose’ an entire language, or grant a monopoly right over it, and at most limited privatization is justified for the purposes of copyright and trademark law, i.e. to protect economic rights. For the mother tongue–native speaker model, the idea of language rights represents one form of recognition of a language as property. For the indigenous languages of face-to-face ethnic communities, a form of monopoly ownership has been argued as a serious option, though the exact form of the ownership and the nature of the intellectual property rights involved remain unclear. Finally the question is posed as to the language politics that follow from the integrationist view that languages are ‘myths’ or ‘constructs’.