What happens when two laws come into conflict with each other? United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) vs the language rule
Of course, that isn't meant to say that the declaration shouldn't be respected or that a government/nation might not face backlash for failing to respect it, but in a Canadian court I believe (IANAL) that the UN declaration would be effectively irrelevant.
Edit: I made this comment before reading the article; it appears BC has actually passed legislation requiring them to implement UNDRIP (https://declaration.gov.bc.ca/), so the parent's question remains valid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Rights_Code_(British_Col... is not.
Not even that, but I assume there isn't a line in UNDRIP that specifically says "Indigenous people should be able to register their businesses using their alphabets". My assumption is that it's a more general resolution, and details about what constitutes promoting revitalizing indigenous languages is up to national/local governments.
I think it would be good of the Canadian/BC governments to allow this sort of thing, but I doubt it would be a violation of the resolution, or even the spirit of it, to shelve that particular idea, in favor of others.
If we're talking about "Latin characters" in a colloquial sense, do we allow things like ñ? That's valid in the Spanish version of the latin alphabet, but not in standard English or French. French does use the accent tréma (¨) on certain letters, but not all letters. What about the German ẞ or Norwegian Ø? Are those latin characters? The Romanian ș? The Welsh Ŵ? The Czech Ď? The Polish Ł? The Maltese Ħ?
Specifying English and French is meant to add specificity to what is allowed. While so many languages use "Latin characters", they're often a bit different. I don't look at something in German and think "what on earth are those letters", but I might think "what is that ẞ and what are those dots?"
I'm not arguing that the law should specify how companies name themselves. I'm just saying that specifying English and French makes sense because specifying "Latin characters" leaves a lot to be desired. Do they mean to exclude "J"? Do they mean to exclude "ç"? Do they mean to include "Ł"? You might think that it's obvious what the latin characters are: they're clearly the set of characters that a native English or French speaker thinks is normal, right? As a native-English speaker, the Spanish "ñ" or the French "ç" seem familiar - I've seen them a bunch in my life and I know what they do. The Polish "Ł"? That's unfamiliar to me. What does the line do? I don't know.
They wanted to specify what was allowed and what wasn't allowed and "Latin characters" doesn't narrow it down enough - or potentially narrows it down too much by excluding many English and French words and names.
> What does the line do?
Name is "stroke", function is the same as for other (diacritic) marks, it indicates a variant from the base form. http://enwp.org/diacritic
Well, if you want to be super pedantic:
Arabic numerals look like this:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
٩ ٨ ٧ ٦ ٥ ٤ ٣ ٢ ١ ٠
and appear little-endian when reading.
The ones we use come from devanagari (brahmic) alphabets and look generally like this (though they arrived in Europe via islamic scholarship, hence the common name in some languages)
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९
> The language rule is enshrined in law in B.C.'s Business Corporation Act, which states: "A company or extraprovincial company must display its name ... in legible English or French characters."
Most jurisdictions have official languages. There's room for discussion about colonialist and discriminatory causes and effects, of course. But it's not necessarily obvious that governments ought to accommodate n languages, or to what degree.