Ethnically diverse countries are more prone to conflict, but why do some groups engage in conflict, while others do not? I show that civil conflict in Africa is explained by ethnic groups’ cultural distance to the central government: an increase in cultural distance, proxied by linguistic distance, increases an ethnicity’s propensity to fight over government power. To identify this effect, I leverage within-ethnicity variation in linguistic distance resulting from power transitions between ethnic groups over time. I provide evidence that the effects can be attributed to differences in preferences over both the allocation and the type of public goods. (JEL D74, H41, J15, N47, O15, O17, Z13)