cohesion - European Centre for Modern Languages

Concluding observations
This model will never be realised, its time is past. Today we have instead galloping
diversity. The old assumption that social cohesion would come through uniformity is
false. We can demonstrate this as follows.
First, in nearly homogenous countries there can be brutal civil wars. The near total
absence of linguistic and cultural differences does not of itself protect societies from
conflict. Consider Northern Ireland, Cambodia, or Burma, or ideological conflict in
China over the 20th century.
Societies like Fiji, Canada, Belgium and Sri Lanka have known some level of social
conflict around issues of language and culture mainly because there are few, two (in all
of these cases) moderately equal communities struggling against each other. This isn’t
a problem of too much diversity, it is a problem of rival identifications.
The second piece of evidence for disproving the idea that multilingualism equals
conflict comes from very multilingual and multicultural settings. Indonesians speak
more than 200 languages but the vast bulk of social conflict in that country is
economic, political or due to rival religious ideology, e.g. in Timor or Aceh.
India boasts more than 800 languages and has had multilingual policies since Emperor
Asoka in the 3rd century BC. While many westerners have a view of India as riven
with conflict this is hard to sustain. India counts almost three times the population of
Europe and riots and communal tensions that exist there are mostly about religion,
politics and economic ideologies. There have been many language conflicts but in the
context of the vast diversity of India they do not seem so great and are not the principal
cause of the social conflict that does exist.
Papua New Guinea’s 4 million people speak almost 800 languages and Vanuatu’s
110,000 people speak 100 tribal languages, English, French and an English-French
creole called Bislama, and yet the level of social cohesion on a linguistic basis is rather
high. South Africa recognises 13 official languages in its constitution. Social problems
in that society are not due to linguistic diversity.
In monolingual societies there can be sharp divisions or differences of communication
in style and ideological perspective. In highly multilingual communities there can be a
shared common communicative form.
It isn’t the existence of multilingualism per se that causes social conflict, but the
absence of a shared form of communication. People who fight with each other in race
riots don’t fight because they can’t communicate with each other. They fight because
their values and ideas and interests conflict in some fundamental way.
Language policy can support social cohesion within multilingualism in three ways:
first, by promoting shared forms of communication; second, by securing language
rights for all minorities; third, by investing all language education with activities that
promote shared identity, common activity and shared productive consciousness.
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