Language Politics and Linguistic Justice: A Response to 'Politics of Language in a (Dis)United Ireland' by Brian Ó Conchubhair

Justice, according to John Rawls, is ‘the first virtue of social institutions’ (1971, 3). I hope that Brian Ó Conchubhair will forgive me if I take just one detail from a paper rich in details, namely his use of the term ‘injustice’, as a springboard for a few brief points on how the idea of linguistic justice may be said to pertain to the politics of language in Ireland. That Ireland is the particular context here is significant. Linguistic justice, as with justice more generally, is context-specific: it takes on different meanings according to the particularities of the given real-world situation. What I have to say here is drawn from ongoing interdisciplinary work supported by a grant from the Irish government. 2 That work is as yet unpublished. Briefly, our analysis asked the following.