Marginalized and Misunderstood: How Anti‑Rohingya Language… 299 Protecting Language Rights in Displacement Ultimately, language policies have served to persecute the Rohingya in their (unrecognized) home communities within Myanmar, as well as in host societies during forced displacement. The Rohingya language—a marker of identity, culture, and shared history—remains deeply threatened, much like the people who speak it. McCormick (2019) argues that changes in Burmese language policies will depend on attitudinal changes since large segments of the mainstream population negatively view multilingualism. “There is still a lingering suspicion that allowing the use of languages other than Burmese will promote separationist sentiment,” he explains (pp. 254). Advocates are currently undertaking work to alter negative perceptions of the Rohingya and to celebrate their language and culture, however, and existing norms associated with self-determination and language offer a conceptual foundation for moving forward. While the Burmese government does not recognize the Rohingya as a “national race”—and neighboring states such as Bangladesh also reject claims to indigeneity—norms associated with the global Indigenous rights movement nevertheless provide important starting points for considering the linguistic rights of the Rohingya. As noted earlier, the issue of language endangerment is frequently discussed in relation to Indigenous communities, but rarely in the context of other instances of forced displacement. Yet indigenous peoples’ focus on linguistic rights emphasizes the centrality of language in the protection of broader cultural heritage and universal human rights. In the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), for instance, Article 3 emphasizes the right to self-determination to pursue, among other things, social and cultural development. Ensuing articles specifically highlight linguistic rights: Article 13.1 outlines “the right to revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future generations their histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems and literatures, and to designate and retain their own names for communities, places and persons.” Article 14 protects the right to education in one’s own language, while Article 16 ensures the right to establish media in those languages (United Nations 2007). The systematic destruction of Indigenous communities (in terms of both physical and cultural genocide) that necessitated the formulation of these language rights is also prevalent in Rohingya communities; while state governments may reject the application of UNDRIP’s norms to the Rohingya, this legal framework offers ways to conceptualize what positive change might entail. Indeed, the case of the Rohingya provides a starting point for expanding the language rights movement to advocate for marginalized minorities more broadly—including those displaced by mass atrocity crimes. As mentioned, advocates are already taking steps to demand Rohingya self-determination and mobilize for language rights. Increasingly, Rohingya diasporic activists use online and offline strategies to “contest the claims of authority of Myanmar, bringing into question the legitimacy of an established territorial state” (Abraham and Jaehn 2019, pp. 2). One such project is the campaign to have the Rohingya script recognized by the Unicode Consortium, a U.S.-based nonprofit that regulates the modern representation 13