The question of multilingual states is not new: John Stuart Mill establishes that states are founded upon a shared culture that necessarily and perhaps most importantly includes a shared language, to Jean Jacques Rousseau, who believes that the most successful states are those that are small, homogenous, and again, inevitably monolingual. However, homogenous states do not exist and have never existed, and it is equally impractical to imagine affording national sovereignty to every cultural group: just as there is no such thing as a monocultural state, there is also no such thing as a culture that exists in a vacuum, untouched by its neighbors and by other external pressures. To a similar end, there is no such thing as a minority nation that itself is free of minorities. For example, Catalans comprise a minority in Spain, yet Spanish speakers comprise a minority within Catalonia: the status of Spanish-speakers in Catalonia thus is considered to be a question of minority rights despite the fact that they are technically a part of the majority. Theories of the state need to explicitly account for the presence of national groups with some claims to self-determination.
The first chapter outlines the work of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and attempts to describe and analyze their work with respect to contemporary liberal theory. The second chapter reviews a handful of critical texts in contemporary liberal theory, with special emphasis placed on the work of Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer, in an effort to recognize how their work informs the case to be studied in the third chapter. The first part of the third chapter comprises a brief history of the Quiet Revolution and its precursor in Québec. The second part of the third chapter examines a few essays written on the eve of Québec's 1995 sovereignty referendum. The epilogue introduces the most recent amendment to Québec's Charter of the French Language.
This thesis does not provide an overarching theory of language rights, but it does engage with some valuable texts that shed light on this topic and hopefully illuminates the profound nature of this topic.
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