Linguistic rights (or language rights or linguistic human rights) are the human and civil rights concerning the individual and collective right to choose the language or languages for communication in a private or public atmosphere. Other parameters for analyzing linguistic rights includes degree of territoriality, amount of positivity, orientation in terms of assimilation or maintenance, and overtness.

Linguistic rights include, among others, the right to one's own language in legal, administrative and judicial acts, language education, and media in a language understood and freely chosen by those concerned.

Linguistic rights in international law are usually dealt in the broader framework of cultural and educational rights.

Important documents for linguistic rights include the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, as well as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Dominic A. LeBlanc, PC, MP (born December 14, 1967), is a Canadian lawyer and politician from New Brunswick, Canada. He is the Member of Parliament for the riding of Beauséjour and sits in the Canadian House of Commons as the Liberal Party's Foreign Affairs Critic. He was first elected in the 2000 federal election and has been re-elected in the last four elections. LeBlanc is the son of former Member of Parliament, Senator and Governor General of Canada, Roméo LeBlanc.

LeBlanc ran for leadership of Liberal Party in 2008 but dropped out of the race to endorse Michael Ignatieff, who was later acclaimed leader. With the resignation of Ignatieff after the 2011 federal election LeBlanc is considered a likely candidate in the race to succeed him as party leader.

LeBlanc was born in Ottawa, Ontario. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of Toronto (Trinity College), a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of New Brunswick, and then attended Harvard Law School, where he obtained his Master of Laws degree.

Kirsty Sword Gusmão (born Kirsty Sword 19 April 1966) is married to Xanana Gusmão, Prime Minister and former President of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste or East Timor. She is the founding director of the Alola Foundation, which seeks to improve the lives of women in Timor-Leste, a nation with one of the world's lowest per capita GDP.

Sword Gusmão was born in 1966 in Melbourne, Australia, to schoolteachers Brian and Rosalie Sword, and was raised there and in Bendigo. Sword Gusmão attended Eaglehawk Primary School, where her father was the principal and her mother a music teacher in the 1970s. She was taught her first Indonesian words by her father when she was four years old. She was a promising ballet dancer, but decided not to pursue it as a career. As a teen, Sword Gusmão travelled to Bali and Jakarta with her father and brother. After Golden Square Secondary College, she attended Monash University and University of Melbourne in the 1980s where she completed a Bachelor of Arts (Honours), majoring in Indonesian and Italian, and a Diploma of Education. In 1985, while studying Indonesian at Monash, Sword Gusmão met Timor-Leste students and took up their struggle for independence. Her father Brian died in 1998.

Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,cognitive scientist, historian, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.

Ideologically identifying with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism, Chomsky is known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy and contemporary capitalism, and he has been described as a prominent cultural figure. His media criticism has included Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media.

According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall. Chomsky is the author of over 100 books. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.

Robert Phillipson (born 16 March 1942 in England) is Research Professor at Copenhagen Business School's Department of English. He is perhaps best known for writing Linguistic Imperialism and English-Only Europe?: Challenging Language Policy (translated in Esperanto by István Ertl: Ĉu nur-angla Eŭropo? Defio al lingva politiko). He graduated as an undergraduate from Cambridge University

He got his PhD from the University of Amsterdam and his interests include language pedagogy, language policy, and linguistic human rights.

On 21 February 2010, Phillipson was awarded the Linguapax Prize along with Miquel Siguan i Soler. Linguapax Institute describes them as "renowned advocates of multilingual education as a factor of peace and of linguistic rights against cultural and linguistic homogenization processes".

Robert Phillipson is married to Tove Skutnabb-Kangas.