In the editorial ”Is Canada headed for splitsville?” you assert that
”competing languages erode the national identity required to sustain a nation.” This overly naive emphasis on just one factor of nationhood is refuted by examples like Switzerland, with its four indigenous languages, China, with its mutually unintelligible dialects, a politically unifying European Community and Canada itself, which has up to this point enjoyed more than a century and a half of unification.
More alarming is your willingness to accept the need for a single, common language-even while pointing out that ”language is central to identity”-at the expense of the individual and culturally different groups. Shall we likewise forego and condemn multiplicity in other aspects of our lives central to identity?
It is curious that multiplicity in language is openly targeted as something of which we may remain justifiably intolerant, though it involves a difference stemming solely from ethnic and geographical accidents of birth. Presumably this intolerance is due in large part to simple ignorance of linguistic truths, and would quickly fade, like many other prejudices, when such truths are learned.
Whatever the reason, our continuing unity depends on nothing more than it does vigilance against such new forms of prejudice.