Among the many reasons for which legal scholars should be interested in language, perhaps the most compelling is law’s overwhelming dependence on language’s function as a pervasive instrument of power to frame and resolve disputes and manipulate social behaviour. With a background in both language and law, Leung, in turn, enjoins linguists to pay attention to legal processes, since these are increasingly used to manage linguistic behaviour. In this book, her primary focus is on the power struggles behind language laws and language rights and their reproduction in persuasive discourses, and she embraces Comaroff and Commaroff’s view that rights emerge from power rather than power from rights.Footnote ¹ She offers numerous examples from around the world of how even the most emancipatory intentions are constrained by the sociopolitical implausibility of treating languages equally, and shows how these constraints are compounded by the sociolinguistic difficulty of replicating legal meaning across languages.

In examining why an increasing number of polities grant official recognition to more than one language, and what implications this has for rights and practices on the ground, Leung uses the term “shallow equality” for the way in which legal mechanisms purport to treat languages equally when they are patently unequal socioeconomically and politically. In this, she contributes a linguistic take on the debate about the social utility of legal concepts of equality sparked by WestenFootnote ² and it should be noted from the outset that, by shallow, Leung does not mean bogus. Her term covers a number of arrangements of varying utility, from largely symbolic provisions appealing to identity politics to measures actively promoting access to legal and government services for multiple speech communities.

Where jurisprudence is more symbolic, as in Bolivia’s recognition of 36 official languages, some of them dead, it is not necessarily lip service since symbolism plays an important role in legal systems. Indeed, attempts to push for deeper equality may not serve the interests of justice if language rights are in competition with other rights that have more transformative potential. Where jurisprudence supports more substantive equality, as in Canada’s adoption of bilingual legal drafting (rather than mere translation) and recognition of the right to address the court in either English or French (rather than through an interpreter), it faces structural barriers in the social practices within which language behaviour is embedded. Hence, some Canadian provinces have difficulty in meeting the right to a francophone jury without compromising the principle of random selection. For Leung, language rights are neither legal myths nor panaceas for equality, but reflect complex and dynamic sociopolitical realities, and do so even more than other legal rights, since nearly all social behaviour is predicated on our production and reception of language. This reminder of the unavoidability of language policy in law recalls Kymlicka’s observation about courts having an option to eliminate religious preferences, but not to dispense with language preferences.Footnote ³

The first half of Leung’s book focuses on motivations for official multilingualism while the second half considers its impact, although both aspects are addressed throughout in acknowledgement of the recursive nature of legal reform. Motivations are diverse, given that over a third of the world’s polities grant official status to more than one language for a range of reasons, some more opaque than others, but to some extent we can predict the outcomes of language laws from the political ecologies that foster them. Early on, she brings up Ukraine’s 2012 Principles of State Language Policy, whose ostensible neutrality in granting local status to languages that were spoken by at least 10% was calculated to shore up support in Russophone areas. When a less Russophile government took over in 2014, one of the first things it did was abolish the policy, helping to push the Crimea toward secession. Russia subsequently sought legitimacy for its annexation by theatrically proclaiming equality among the Russian, Ukrainian, and Tartar languages on the peninsula.

Manipulation of language behaviour begins with categorization. In a world of overlapping varieties and code-switching, some linguists have abandoned the very idea of drawing boundaries between languages, but law and politics do this constantly. Hence the Yugoslavian civil war spawned Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian from what had effectively been a single-speech community. Having given languages labels, many polities go on to give some of them official status, typically where there is a degree of uncertainty about their position for historical reasons or contemporary competition. (Hence calls to make English the official language in the US have most traction in heavily Hispanic areas.) Languages with relatively little local currency may be made official as part of geopolitical realignment, as evinced by the legal espousal of English in Gabon, Rwanda, and South Sudan.

Leung devotes most of her book to the third of the world giving official status to more than one language. Varied as their motivations are, such as the promotion of vehicles of post-colonial unity alongside vehicles of economic expediency (e.g. Kiswahili and English in Kenya, or Kazakh and Russian in Kazakhstan) or the construction of national communities from different speech communities (e.g. Canada, South Africa), the outcomes of official multilingualism are more varied still. Singapore’s recognition of Malay as the national language owes more to its historical importance than to its speakers, who are outnumbered by English- and Chinese (though not Tamil)-speakers among the constitutional languages. In recognizing Kirundi, Burundi goes further by undertaking to publish laws in it, alongside French (but not in Flemish, which has lost its status). Finland goes well beyond symbolism in guaranteeing Swedish-speakers the right to use their language in a comprehensive range of institutions. Official status sometimes slips in unofficially. Despite being the main lingua franca, Afrikaans lacks formal standing in Namibia, but courts have a discretionary power to admit it and, in J.G.A. Diergaardt et al v. Namibia (1997), the United Nations Human Rights Committee found Afrikaans-speaking officials refusing to respond to citizens in it to be in breach of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

One possible result of official multilingualism is the right to use more than one language in legal discourse without translation. But translation is vital to generating the comprehensive corpora on which multilingual law depends, and the translator’s search for legal equivalence is beset by linguistic and sociocultural obstacles. Even if a word can be translated precisely in a given context, it may not have the same legal effect in other contexts. Hong Kong has seen several instances of apparently innocuous words producing different judicial decisions according to the medium of the text referred to and, when political tensions are high, innocuousness gives way to controversy. To deal with the inevitability of mismatches, some jurisdictions declare one language authentic (Irish in Ireland and Maltese in Malta, for example, even though texts in them are generally translations from English). Canada and Hong Kong, on the other hand, and supranational jurisdictions like the EU, adopt the principle of co-authenticity rooted in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and apply a range of statutory interpretation steps to resolve discrepancies. Perhaps this is done most actively in Canada, where bilingual co-drafting and redrafting are also promoted. But Leung produces a number of examples, including from her home jurisdiction of Hong Kong, of rules of interpretation being bent in favour of languages of power such as English.

Even where there is a multilingual legal corpus, the right to address a court in an official language is not always supported; and it may not entail a corresponding right to be responded to in that language. There are also differential stances on whether defendants, litigants, or witnesses have the right to use any official language or only the one that they are deemed to speak best. Whatever the policy, no legal system recognizes every language used in the surrounding society. Hence multilingual law does not remove the need for interpreters. But it may influence the way they work.

One of the most compelling aspects of Leung’s book is the parallels she draws between notions of linguistic and legal equality. Equal treatment is generally considered integral to justice, but it typically indexes individualistic, abstract, and universalist constructions of rights, whereas language is communitarian, concrete, and socially embedded. Laws supporting official multilingualism, and conventions such as the Barcelona Declaration that proclaim the equality of languages, need to acknowledge the relations of dominance and inequality that characterize multilingualism in the real world, and to recognize that genuine equality may be impossible. Indeed, Leung argues that no jurisdiction accords symmetrically equivalent power to different languages, just as no society grants equal recognition to all religious, ethical, or cultural values. To attempt to do so may overwhelm socioeconomic resources and divert attention from the pursuit of other forms of equality.

Despite this reality check, Leung does not dismiss the value of enhancing access to justice for minority language speakers or using legal measures to protect endangered languages. But her paramount objective is to show that official multilingualism is a highly complex, intensely political, and largely modern phenomenon, capable of serving both symbolic and socioeconomic needs yet not inherently superior to official monolingualism as an instrument of equity. Official multilingualism and official monolingualism alike are based on the politics of difference, and each has the capacity to manage alterity generously or parsimoniously.

Leung acknowledges that, in attempting to cast her net so wide, she has made sacrifices and the lack of ethnography in this book, which draws on a vast range of official documents and research literature, inevitably leans toward generalization. On paper, for example, English is indeed the sole medium of Botswanan law, but observations will show that Setswana is used routinely by both lay and legal participants in subordinate courts. Perhaps Leung could have better explored linkage between the legal status of a language and its admissibility in legal practice since the one does not imply the other. And it would have been interesting to read more on her marginalization of language planning as a research tool, given that the field has been engaged for decades in the political aspects of language management she focuses on. Nevertheless, this is an impressive investigation of how language rights analysis may inform our thinking about legal rights in general, and a welcome attempt at theory-building in language and law—a field that has tended to be dominated by discrete technical problems rather than the wider socio-legal issues from which they spring.