Year by Year: Legal Battles for Endangered Languages
A Chronology of Legislation and Court Cases Shaping Language Preservation

About this book:

From the ashes of World War II to the frontiers of artificial intelligence, *Year by Year: Legal Battles for Endangered Languages* traces the seventy-five-year legal war over the right to speak, teach, and exist in one's ancestral tongue. Through twenty-five pivotal moments—from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to Bolivia's thirty-seven official languages, from *Lau v. Nichols* to the Sámi victory in *Nor-Tawash v. Sweden*—this chronicle reveals how courts, constitutions, and international conventions became both the executioners and the saviors of the world's vanishing voices.

Each chapter places you in the courtroom, the legislative chamber, or the negotiating table where the fate of a language hung on a single vote, a judicial opinion, or an activist's refusal to disappear. You will witness how the law that once banned Native children from speaking Navajo in boarding schools later mandated their right to immersion education; how a French constitutional council struck down Breton immersion programs while Wales legislated its language into digital modernity; and how Indigenous plaintiffs from New Zealand to Nicaragua forced states to treat linguistic survival as a legal obligation, not a cultural favor.

As algorithms scrape the last recordings of dying dialects and AI models claim ownership of collective memory, the final chapter confronts the newest frontier: digital sovereignty. Rigorously researched and globally scoped, this is the definitive legal history for linguists, lawyers, policymakers, and anyone who understands that when a language loses its legal standing, a world vanishes with it.