The search for linguistic equality

Abstract

Five papers from the symposium on language and equality, held in New York in 2014 and organized by the Working Group on Language and the United Nations, make up this special issue of Language Problems and Language Planning. The symposium highlighted the difficulty of defining the nature of language equality, the many instances in which it is abandoned in favor of some apparently more practical goal (for example, the expansion of English in higher education, or the assimilation of immigrants into the United States), efforts in the past to achieve such equality (notably the Esperanto experiment), and the apparent sidelining of language as a variable in the planning of United Nations activities and goals.