Resumen de Escrituralidad, preservación de la lengua y derechos humanos lingüísticos: tres casos ilustrativos
Drawing on multi-year ethnographic research inQuechua-speaking communities of highland Peru and in Cambodian and Puerto Rican communities in inner city Philadelphia, this paper explores the degree to which the development of literacy in minority languages does or does not contribute to minority linguistic hu-man rights and to minority language maintenance. The cases of the cyclical immigrant / citizen Puerto Rican population in the US, of the newly arrived Southeast Asian refugee populations in the US, and of a long-oppressed indigenous population in Peru provide three unique and different contexts in which to explore these issues, so central to local and national identi-ties in an increasingly mobile and ethnically jigsawed world. The cases confirm that the relationship between literacy and language and culture maintenance is a complicated one, in which empowerment plays a sig-nificant role. They also highlight questions about va-rious counterpoised dimensions of linguistic human rights - tolerance and promotion, individual and com-munal freedoms, freedom from discrimination and freedom for use, claims-to and claims-against. Thepaper concludes by suggesting that the promotion oflinguistic human rights will have to continually confrontdifficult ethical choices and that the guiding principlesin those choices must be to balance the counterpointsof those dimensions for the mutual protection of all
