SUNS  4322 Thursday 12 November 1998

Geneva, Nov 10 (IPS/Gustavo Capdevila) - Some 3,000 tongues are spoken in the 185 member states of the United Nations, but English reigns supreme in the world forum, participants in a recent debate on pluri-lingualism in international institutions complained.

In fact, UN General Assembly resolutions that establish both English and French as the working languages of the UN secretariat are routinely disregarded, according to presenters at the seminar, held last week in Geneva.

The cultural environment and "a certain linguistic passiveness have encouraged a tendency for people to express themselves in English," said Boutros Boutros-Ghali, secretary general of 'La Francophonie', the association of French-speaking countries worldwide, which organized the conference.

The former UN secretary-general said that defending linguistic plurality against the growing influence of monolingualism, does reflect jealousy or "nostalgia for power".

A document presented by La Francophonie and titled 'Investing in Diversity', explained that plurilingualism was not limited to the defence of French, but was meant to benefit the entire Francophone community, made up of 52 countries with a combined population of 550 million, only 180 million of whom speak French.

The administrator of La Francophonie, Roger Dehaybe, defined pluri-lingualism as "a profoundly humanistic international cause". The fight to defend pluri-lingualism is an ethical one, he said, and it has a strategic dimension with regard to the all-  powerful mass media.

The secretary-general of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Rubens Ricupero, shared his concern over the fate of communications, predicting that the electronic trade would soon be dominated by a single language: English. Ricupero wondered whether globalized telecommunications and the audio-visual industry "will impose cultural uniformity".

The UNCTAD head called for the creation of space for other languages in electronic communications.

Therese Gastaut, director of information services at the United Nations in Geneva, lamented the fact that multi-lingualism did not have the same status within the UN community as other "causes", such as women's equality, the protection of minorities or the fight against religious intolerance.

The status of linguistic pluralism at the UN in Geneva "is not ideal, but it is acceptable", said Gastaut. But in relation to other UN headquarters in other parts of the world, "Geneva is, unfortunately, an exception", she said.

Several proposals were put forth at the seminar for the promotion of pluri-lingualism in alliance with other cultural groups, like the British Commonwealth, the Arab League, the Portuguese-speaking
countries, and the Ibero-American countries.

Francois-Xavier Ngoubeyou, head of the Cameroonian mission to the UN in Geneva, recalled that French-speaking diplomats and their Arab and Spanish-speaking colleagues had agreed on several occasions to suspend UN sessions until documents were distributed in all the UN languages.

Solidarity transcended language and cemented "an alliance with the Latin Americans in decisive votes in UN agencies", said Ngoubeyou.

Boutros-Ghali said "this struggle is not the monopoly of the Francophone countries". It belongs to all the large linguistic communities, such as the Portuguese, Spanish, Arab, Russian and Asian
communities, "but also the English speakers", he said. However, he warned that the pluralism issue should not be framed in terms of an exacerbated rivalry, but rather as a unifying complementarity".