Caroline Bowen, the wife of a frequenter of this site, Don Bowen, is a speech pathologist in Australia. I imagine she might have something to say about this:
A STUDY of newborn babies and preschoolers has revealed that language may be the root of prejudice – and the way to avoid it.
US and French researchers have found that the language babies hear spoken in their first six months of life leads to a preference for speakers of that language.
The preference is so entrenched that by age five youngsters prefer playmates who not only speak the same language but do so with the same accent.
A key implication of the findings – reported in the US publication Proceedings of the National Academy of Science – is that children exposed to different languages grow into more tolerant adults than their monolingual mates. [full text]
So let’s all give a big thank you to Dora the Explorer, and also to those Wiggles videos with songs from other languages. Lisa Loeb and Elizabeth Mitchell also have a wonderful CD called “Catch the Moon” that features French and Japanese songs.
Kmareka.com 
Good to see that tolerance can be taught, even at fairly young ages.
Caroline, Thanks for your perspective and providing a more nuanced excerpt from the study.
Discussions of human speech and language are as fascinating as the controversial nature of the subjects they include. The origin of language in humans is a marvelous mix of fossils, behaviour in our closest relatives, modern language studies in all their complexity and whimsy. Language needs to be separated from “communication.” Many if not virtually all organisms “communicate” in some fashion and transmit information, but only our species, and likely other human species not H. sapiens, had or has language with a structured grammar and vocabulary that is representational of real objects, emotions and behavior, as well as a determinant of group identity. As in any epanding field, there is more we do not know and needs to be discovered than what we do know with certainty. Kierstan and Caroline have provided a most interesting set of discussions.