Thomas Benedikter Books

India not only is concerned with inevitable multilingualism, but also with the rights of many millions of speakers of minority languages. As the political and cultural context privileges some major languages, linguistic minorities often feel discriminated against by the current language policy of the Union and the States. They experience on a daily basis that their mother tongues are deemed worthless dialects that have little utility in modern life. Many such languages have definitively disappeared, and several more are on the brink of extinction. Is this the inevitable price to be paid for economic modernization, cultural homogenisation and the multilingual fabric of India's society at large? This book is an effort to map India's linguistic minorities and to assess the language policy towards these communities. The author, a senior researcher of the EURAC (South Tyrol, Italy), assuming linguistic rights as a component of fundamental human rights, codified in a number of international covenants and in the Indian Constitution, provides an appraisal of the extent to which language rights are respected in India's multilingual reality, which takes into consideration the experiences of minority language protection in other regions.

An unclouded look at territorial autonomy back and forward, 100 years after the establishment of the first "modern" territorial autonomy in a democratic the Åland Islands in Finland in 1921/22. Where has autonomy been successful to ensure minority protection and self-government, where has it failed, where is it in crisis, where is it aspired to? In which cases would autonomy settle open conflicts between states and regional communities, and in which cases of national emancipation is autonomy no longer sufficient? In 2021, after 100 years of experience with territorial autonomy in all parts of the world, this concept for solving sub-state conflicts is still underestimated. Background information and assessments on the development to date and on the perspectives for the application of territorial autonomy in various regions worldwide by the author of "The World's Modern Autonomy Systems", conversations with ten outstanding personalities from politics and science in these regions and a foreword by the South Tyrolean politician and scientist Oskar Peterlini, former senator in Rome.Thomas Benedikter is an economist and political scientist, publicist, working for South Tyrol's Center for Political Studies and Civic Education POLITiS.