Abstract:The concept of a ‘linguistic community’ plays a critical role in Canadian language rights law, appearing explicitly in both the Constitution and in statutory law as well as featuring prominently in the case law. Despite its ubiquity, however, this concept has never been explicitly defined, nor has it been subjected to sustained analysis by the courts or in legal scholarship. This is problematic, as the term can be interpreted in divergent ways, and the choice one makes in this respect has the potential to substantially alter the content of various constitutional and statutory provisions. Reduced to its simplest form, the problem is that the word ‘community’ can be interpreted in one of two ways: (a) as designating a collective entity of some kind or (b) as nothing more than a shorthand for labelling a certain class of individuals based on their linguistic competency and geographic location. This article examines which of these options ought to be preferred when construing references to a ‘linguistic community’ in constitutional or statutory provisions or in the relevant case law. Part ii of the article examines the concept of a community from a philosophical perspective and outlines a theoretical framework for distinguishing between cases where a collection of people should be viewed as a mere aggregate of individuals and those where it should be conceptualized as a collective entity with interests distinct from its individual members. Part iii then explores how this framework can be used to better understand the somewhat murky conceptual foundations of the leading language rights cases. I argue that these foundations can be explicated or completed by combining the concept of a ‘community’ developed in Part ii with ideas drawn from the social scientific research on the relationship between language, culture, and identity.

中文翻译：

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语言共同体的概念

摘要：“语言共同体”的概念在加拿大语言权利法中起着至关重要的作用，在宪法和成文法中都有明确的体现，在判例法中也占有突出地位。然而，尽管它无处不在，这个概念从未被明确定义，也没有受到法院或法律学术界的持续分析。这是有问题的，因为该术语可以以不同的方式解释，并且人们在这方面做出的选择有可能大大改变各种宪法和法规的内容。简化为最简单的形式，问题是“社区”这个词可以用以下两种方式之一来解释：(a) 指定某种集体实体或 (b) 只不过是根据语言能力和地理位置标记某类个人的简写。本文探讨了在解释宪法或法律规定或相关判例法中对“语言共同体”的引用时，应优先考虑哪些选项。文章的第二部分从哲学的角度考察了社区的概念，并概述了一个理论框架，用于区分以下情况：一群人应该被视为仅仅是个人的集合，而那些人应该被概念化为一个集体实体利益不同于其个人成员。然后，第三部分探讨了如何使用该框架来更好地理解主要语言权利案例的有些模糊的概念基础。我认为，通过将第二部分中发展的“社区”概念与从语言、文化和身份之间关系的社会科学研究中得出的想法相结合，可以解释或完善这些基础。