Minorities as citizens: The legal advocacy of language rights by the Hungarian minority in Romania

This article investigates the assertion of language rightsthrough legal mobilization by the Hungarian minority inRomania, thus examining this emergent kind of mobilizationaimed at the claiming of rights, often rights recognized bylaw, but not enforced in practice. This incongruity betweenrights on paper and their execution provokes interethnicrivalry for the visibility of language and culture, in which theexclusive ownership of sovereignty is marked by the domi-nance of national language in physical spaces coined as ‘lin-guistic territoriality’ (Cserg}o, 2007), fostering parallel,monolingual public spheres. Applying Rancière's theory tothe case of the Hungarian minority in Romania, it is arguedthat civil society activists' legal mobilization initiatives are amanifestation of ‘politics’ in the Rancièreian sense as theychallenge the distribution of public spaces along ethnic linesthrough pushing forward their integrative vision of thesame spaces—thus ‘seeking the litigious distribution ofplaces and roles’ (Rancière, 2003, p. 201)