Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

230 Language Diversity in the Classroomso for a long time, it is quite possible that your color vocabulary will notrange over the nuances of green and red reflected in the language ofspeakers in more temperate climatic zones. If, however, your groupsuddenly finds oil under the sands, becomes very rich, and moves enmasse to the Riviera, then you can be sure that lexical expansion will soonfollow. So, while a ‘strong’ or ‘tight’ Whorfianism is unlikely, a ‘weaker’variety makes perfect sense, for the reason just mentioned. It is plausibleto accept that there is a circular and mutually reinforcing relationshipbetween language and the environment (both physical and sociocultural) and the upshot will be that language influences our customary orhabitual ways of thinking. That is, there is a connection here, but it is a‘loose’ one reflecting habitual ways of looking at the world, notcognitively inevitable ones. 8In like manner, I suggested that there is a ‘soft’ multiculturalism thatacknowledges diversity, and may even make some formal accommodationto it at educational or social-policy levels, and a ‘hard’ version thatunderpins deeper and more permanent structural alterations. In practice,the first reflects an older social vision that whether unarticulated orofficially upheld believes in some ultimate assimilation. It is anassimilation of choice, one might say, and not a forced or legislatedone; nonetheless, assimilation is seen as a desirable end-point. Particulargroups, or individuals within groups, may wish to maintain markers ofethnic distinctiveness, but most will acquiesce at some point to the socialpressures and benefits associated with ‘mainstream’ life. This is thegeneral pattern that has described the social trajectories of most newworldimmigrants: the ethnic connection between a fourth-generation‘Polish-American’ and her first-generation forebear is now largely asymbolic one. (Precisely because of its intangibility, symbolic ethnicitycan be a very enduring matter, and it is not an inconsiderable orpsychologically negligible quantity; for details, see Edwards, 1994a.) It is,in fact, essentially what Horace Kallen (1924) wrote about under theheading of ‘cultural pluralism’. A typical linguistic manifestation hereis this: first-generation monolingualism in the language spoken uponarrival at (say) Ellis Island; second-generation bilingualism in thatlanguage and English; third-generation monolingualism in English.‘Hard’ multiculturalism, on the other hand, is a more clearly articulatedpolicy that aims at an enduring diversity, an ongoing ethnoculturalpluralism, a society with room for a broad array of languages andcultures. Harmonious intergroup relations are, of course, hoped for here;indeed, the argument is often made that it is precisely the recognition andcultivation of diversity that will lead to such relations. The belief is, as