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Living together better:

a linguistic contribution

Raymond Renard, International Centre for Applied Phonetics, University of Mons, Belgium

he International Centre of Applied Phonetics (CIPA)

in Mons, Belgium, was created half a century ago

in 1965, as a non-profit organization with the aim

of promoting another way of developing speech as a disci-

pline which is open to human development. The centre

gradually turned to cooperation, essentially with French-

speaking Africa, and to the defence of peace. In association

with the French-speaking United Nations Educational,

Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Chair in

Language Planning and Language Teaching in Educational

Systems since 1995, its expertise was rapidly recognized

at an international level and was consecrated, initially by

gaining UNESCO consultative status and later a mutually

informative status with the Organisation Internationale

de la Francophonie (OIF).

CIPA immediately opted to defend UNESCO’s specific

founding principles expressed in its famous 1953 report,

summarized below:

The importance of the mother language in the development of

the individual.

The mother language, or that of the environ-

ment, is a complex, multisensory and mainly oral process,

which has a decisive effect on the child’s psychomotor, cogni-

tive, social, emotional and moral development; it involves a

person’s whole personality as far as intelligence, affectivity,

imagination and behaviour are concerned; it is the means by

which one relates to the environment: to master language is to

master the world; language is the pillar of the child’s cultural

identity, the basis of a feeling of security; which we can sum

up as: speak well, feel well.

The role of the language of the environment regarding educa-

tion, social integration and social, economic, political and cultural

development

is capital in every society. The mother language’s

capacity to accurately reflect the reality of the environment,

as opposed to that of a foreign language, justifies the necessity

to use it at least in basis education and explains why resorting

to an exogenous code can only lead to a separation between

society and school, and thereby make education ineffective

and unpopular. Is it necessary to demonstrate the impossibil-

ity of a development respecting human rights, democracy and

‘good’ governance without resorting to the local language?

These characteristics, common to all languages and the fact

that every language contributes to an understanding of the

universe in its own way, assure equal dignity to everyone.

Besides, the extraordinary richness of multilingualism, natu-

rally spread universally, legitimates the battle to protect this

world heritage.

The value of multilingualism

in states and individuals is

important because although every language gives access to the

universal, some of them haven’t yet reached a lexical standardi-

zation or development which gives access to modernity, unlike

every developed country’s language which is a support for

science. Moreover, the knowledge of foreign languages allows

the person to escape a single way of seeing the world, to reconcile

identity and difference, the latter being a real indicator of the

former. Multilingualism is also recognized as a factor of toler-

ance, togetherness and solidarity in as much as it promotes the

passage from the multicultural to the intercultural and prevents

withdrawal into one’s identity or drifting into ethnicity.

“Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men

that the defences of peace must be constructed”

– Preamble of the Constitution of UNESCO, 1945

Raymond Renard of CIPA: “Cultural dialogue equals mutual enrichment”

Image: CIPA

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