Longman Dictionary of

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linguistic rights
aspect of their language use or about the variety of language they speak.
This may result, for instance, in MODIFIED SPEECH, when speakers attempt
to alter their way of speaking in order to sound more like the speakers of
a prestige variety.
see also SOCIOLECT
linguistic method n
a term used to refer to several methods of teaching first-language reading
which claim to be based on principles of linguistics, and in particular to
methods which reflect the views of two prominent American linguists of
the 1940s and 1950s, Leonard Bloomfield and Charles Fries. They argued
that since the written language is based on the spoken language, the
relationship between speech and written language should be emphasized
in the teaching of reading. This led to reading materials which made use
of words which had a regular sound-spelling correspondence and in
which there was a systematic introduction to regular and irregular
spelling patterns. In recent years, applied linguists have continued to propose
and advocate different approaches to the teaching of reading and
language in general, but there is no longer any widely recognized “linguistic
method.”
linguistic relativity n
a belief which was held by some scholars that the way people view the
world is determined wholly or partly by the structure of their NATIVE
LANGUAGE. As this hypothesis was strongly put forward by the
American anthropological linguists Sapir and Whorf, it has often been
called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or Whorfian hypothesis. In recent
years, study of the relationships between cognition and linguistic
expression has been revived in a more subtle form within COGNITIVE
LINGUISTICS.
see also ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS
linguistic rights n
as a category of human rights, i.e.universal rights that belong to all persons,
linguistic rights are based on the idea of human dignity and worth
as well as cultural tolerance. Examples of a linguistic right are the rights
of a minority language community to receive education in their language
and of people to receive governmental services in languages other than the
socially dominant language. Although various proposals have been put
forth to define such linguistic rights, there is so far no general agreement
on them comparable to the principles of human rights codified by the
United Nations.
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