Language and script choices are realigned to match civilizational identity

Evidence

The world is not as simple as Lewis and Huntington want it to be. They desperately want to hold onto a world in which the difference between “us” and “them” is clear. What they ignore, argues Said, is that civilizational identity is not fixed but fluid. All civilizations and cultures, including so-called Western civilization, have intense, often contentious internal debates about how to define themselves. Civilizations are also shaped and transformed by all sorts of migrations and movements between peoples of different cultures. Finally, it is hard to imagine a culture today that, in the past or the present, has walled itself off from other cultures. In fact, every culture has been and continues to be involved in transformative exchanges, contacts, and conversations with other cultures. — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 232 (#complicates, via linked claim)

As the leading linguistic scholar Joshua Fishman has observed, a language is more likely to be accepted as a lingua franca or LWC if it is not identified with a particular ethnic group, religion, or ideology. In the past English had many of these identifications. More recently English has been “de-ethnicized (or minimally ethnicized)”as happened in the past with Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. “It is part of the relative good fortune of English as an additional language that neither its British nor its American fountainheads have been widely or deeply viewed in an ethnic or ideological context for the past quarter century or so” [Italics his]. The use of English for intercultural communication thus helps to maintain and, indeed, reinforces peoples’ separate cultural identities. Precisely because people want to preserve their own culture they use English to communicate with peoples of other cultures. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 166 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Civilizational identity shifts need both sender and receiver to be willing; Colonial identity functions as a style shaping reality language and thought; Language choice marked political reliability and ethnic identity in medieval Holy Land (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Using a lingua franca does not erode the speakers’ own cultural identity #complicates (0.82)
• Civilizational identity is fluid, not fixed or walled off #complicates (0.81) — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 232
• A lingua franca succeeds by being detached from any single ethnic or ideological identity #complicates (0.80) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 166
• Enforcing ethnic and linguistic homogeneity fosters rather than prevents disunity #complicates (0.79) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 891