Dialogue among Civilizations: A New Domain for Language Challenges

Abstract

Dialogue among civilizations (DaC) has been referred as a solution to save the world community. But the question is how to decide about the language of different guests in this global dialogue. Three major ideas have been proposed in this regard. While the first advocates the English language monopoly and discusses its old dominance, the second proposes a newly-built world language which is none of the existing languages, but is a commonly understandable one. The last, which is the main concern of this paper, suggests a multilingual round table. Here, these three ideas are investigated and their feasibility, acceptability and also their repercussions with regard to DaC will be studied. Finally, this study suggests that accepting a multilingual approach in a world dialogue that invites all cultures and civilizations to the contribution will do the best.