Hanna,
While you are correct that it’s difficult to please everyone, it does not necessarily follow that because it’s difficult to meet all minority (language) needs and desires that the default position must be to cater (mostly) only to the needs/desires/wants of the (language) majority.

The argument that there are too many different needs/wants to cater to therefore we’ll (mostly) cater to only one is so common — I see my graduate students make it all the time when we discuss issues such as language education and medium of instruction in a seminar I teach at the U. of Denver in the USA on language, power and globalization.

And why not: This argument allows members of the dominant group to invoke singular, and decidedly exclusive, majority (linguistic) rules in the name of being “fair”. In fact, this approach is only fair in the sense that this logic ensures that all minority groups are treated equally unfairly, ironically in the name of “fairness.”

Dear Shiva, thank you for your comments. The 2012 Minister’s Awards were given to over 250 students from 38 different languages (Arabic, Armenian, Assyrian, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Chinese Mandarin, Chinese Cantonese , Croatian, Czech, Filipino, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian, Maltese, Nepali, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Sinhala, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese) It is impossible to give all announcements in all the different languages present and would make this event rather lengthy. It is difficult to keep it fair to everyone. If anybody has any suggestions about this, I am happy to pass it on to the organisers. Sabine

Hi Hanna, I see the problem not as shifting away from multiculturalism to English as a unifying language but instead not shifting towards multiculturalism – or at least on the level of social practice that’s for sure otherwise your neighbour and the people accidentally clapping at the Minister’s Award wouldn’t be invisible. I am not sure how multiculturalism could fit into Australian nationalist discourse though (even if there is great flexibility in nationalism and it doesn’t necessarily refer to border protection and opposing foreign investment only), did you perhaps mean national?

Once language is stripped away by monolingual ideology & th logic of assimilation, there’s not much left that I identify with in terms of German culture, at least in terms of how it’s (mis)represented in mainstream American cultural settings.

More broadly, the debate about culture and language, and how significant language is, or allegedly is not, to culture, will go on.

To those — and they are many, including many scholars — who critique those who, like myself, insist upon the significance of language to culture for allegedly being “reductive,” I challenge you to: a) establish exactly what specific component parts of culture matter/are important, and which are not, and why/why not; b) answer the key power question of whose criteria such valuations will/ought to be be made based on what criteria with what implications for whom.

In fact, these are exactly the type of issues critics of the language “reductionists” wholly (perhaps willfully?) ignore. Finally, another challenge: Would a completely monolingual world (with English the likely candidate) be as culturally diverse as one with 7,000 languages – what’s your answer, critics of us so-called language “reductionists?