Abstract
Australia is an island continent, that includes a number of small off-shore islands, and the very large island of Tasmania, lying between the Indian and South Pacific Oceans and the sixth largest polity in the world with an area of 2, 967, 893 sq. miles or 7, 686, 850 sq. km. It is an arid ancient land that is about a third desert with most of the population (18, 783, 551) living along the coasts, in the south-east corner and in the capital cities. Australia is a federation of six states (New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia), two Territories (Australian Capital Territory, Northern Territory) with a number of overseas territories (Ashmore and Carter Islands, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Island, Coral Sea Islands, Heard and McDonald Islands, Norfolk Island as well as claims to a large portion of Antarctica), some of which are not permanently inhabited. Indonesia, East Timor and Papua New Guinea lie to the north, other parts of Melanesia lie to the north east, New Zealand lies to the east across the Tasman Sea while Antarctica is to the south. (See Appendix A, Figure 13.) While English is the dominant language, there are more than 200 migrant languages spoken in Australia and perhaps 90 Aboriginal languages remain, although there is ongoing language loss of both languages and registers and only a small number—about 20— are spoken ‘right through’.
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Notes
The term Anglo-Celtic has been commonly used in the literature to refer to the majority population of this period and to their views. However, this usage conflates two quite different linguistic and cultural traditions thereby ignoring the multicultural nature of early European ‘British’ settlement of Australia, and the anti-English tradition there that is largely Irish in origin, e.g., Prime Minister Billy Hughes was highly sensitive during the conscription debate of 1916 to the ‘disloyalty’ of Archbishop Mannix and his (Irish) supporters. That this view of an Anglo-Celtic monocultural pre-WWII Australia continues to be received wisdom reflects the lack of success that Irish-Australians have had in debunking it.
Lo Bianco (1997) has argued that policy making in the 1980s for languages other than English was possible because English was secure (given previous monocultural and assimilationist policies) and because English was always included as a key element in policy making. This might suggest that the refocus on English and English literacy in the 1990s—there seems to be a feeling that one can not be literate in a LOTE—reflects a growing insecurity about English’s role in Australia by some political and community leaders. This is despite evidence that neither literacy (Green, Hodgens and Luke 1994) nor English are in actual decline.
New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria—which had the largest concentration of migrants— produced early policy statements (State Board of Education and MACMME 1987) while Queensland (1992) and other states produced policies somewhat later (see e.g., Baldauf 1993, Djité 1994).
The four main reasons for learning a language were 1) equity or social justice, 2) economic strategies, 3) external relations, and 4) cultural enrichment for all Australians. The reasons were crafted to fit in with Commonwealth responsibilities so funding could be provided to States, particularly in Education. For a more detailed discussion of the development of the policy see Lo Bianco (1990).
The ALLC was a government body and ceased to exist in 1996. Language Australia is a not for profit company which continues to exist on a much reduced scale by doing contract and language testing related work. During the period when these agencies received Commonwealth grant funding, they produced a significant number of reports about language and language-related issues often containing policy recommendations. These were duly published, but had little impact on government policy. It could be argued that one of the reasons for the secession of funding was that the bureaucracy and the government tired of getting reports and recommendations that were critical of their work that suggested new initiatives and that more funding needed to be provided for languages, when these did not accord with their own policy directions.
See Moore (1996) for a discussion of the differences between the NPL and the ALLP and Moore (2002) for a description of how the policies were developed and managed within the bureaucracy.
‘Aboriginal languages’ was counted as one category, but allows funding to go to any appropriate Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander language.
Some additional literature related to language planning in Australia includes: Baldauf and Djité (2000), Clyne (1997a, 1997b, 2001), Djité (1994), Eggington (1994), Ingram (1994), Lo Bianco (1997), Lo Bianco and Wickert (2001), Ozolins (1993).
In the latter half of 2001 the Australian Alliance for Languages (2001) was formed to lobby the political parties about language issues for the November 2001 Commonwealth election, but attracted limited media attention. While it is too early to know whether these efforts will have any effect on the re-elected Liberal/National government, such grass-roots efforts are typical of the way those interested in language policy (e.g., applied linguists, ethnic communities, multiculturalists) in Australia have lobbied government. However, Baldauf and Kaplan (in press) suggest that such efforts are most likely to have an impact on what are primarily political decisions if those in government are interested in doing something in the field (e.g., during the late 1970s and early 1980s when the Commonwealth was actively exploring policy development). On that basis, action seems unlikely.
Based on the most recent (as at the end of 2001) language planning document available on the Department of Education and Youth Affairs (DETYA) website there is a summary of the Commonwealth School Languages Program (Baldauf, de Riva O’Phelan et al. 1998).
Local geographical features (and their names) are central to many Aboriginal ‘dream time’ stories. These stories therefore differ from one Aboriginal country to another and create a continuing relationship between the language and the land.
See Henderson and Nash (2002).
For references related to ATS CLIP see Baldauf (1996), Lo Bianco and Rhydwen (2001), McKay (1996) and Walsh (2001). Amery (2001) has described language reclamation work while articles in Devlin, Harris, Black and Enemburu (1995) discuss sociolinguistic and educational issues. Schmidt (1990) describes the loss of Australia’s Aboriginal heritage.
These varieties exist on a continuum that is found across the country. It is hypothesised that it first appeared among children of the first settlers of Sydney, who developed a common way of speaking across the dialects of Great Britain that were present, with the London and south-eastern dialects best represented. This earlier form of Broad Australian, with strong south-east British features, was probably establish among the young within a generation of settlement (by 1820). Instrumental studies have shown that General and Cultivated Australian—probably the result of gentrification—are more closely and systematically related to the Broad form than to any British dialect (Delbridge et al. 1997).
The down side of this is that first language (or even second language) materials supplied to community languages may not be appropriate for Australian students, many of whom are second language learners. Expectations—what programs can really achieve—also may be unrealistic, and imported teachers and language advisors may find the Australian school system very different—and hard to adjust to—when compared to their own. Other problems relate to things like which Chinese characters to adopt—Taiwanese or those from the PRC.
In 1995 there were 21 accredited bilingual programs (in 34 languages and dialects) in 16 Department of Education, 3 Catholic and 1 Independent school (Lo Bianco and Rhydwen 2001). The debate about the closing of the program reflected the two initial interpretations of the program’s aims, with proponents focussing on two-way schooling and the benefits of studying Aboriginal language and culture, while the opponents focused on the lack of English language outcomes and the programs’ high costs—an ESL program was seen as being more educationally and cost effective.
See Janik (1996) for a Victorian example of Polish language teaching.
The actual size and number of language programs in Australian universities in hard to determine as there is no central record of either languages or enrolments for university subjects. The information presented here is taken from surveys done in 1994 (Baldauf, et al. 1995) and 1997 (White, Baldauf and Diller 1997). In addition, although a subject like Burmese was listed in both surveys, it has not been taught for the last decade because of insufficient student numbers. For most of the small languages, there would only be one unit of study available.
As this section indicates, there is an on-going world-wide debate as to whether sign language is indeed in any technical sense a true language (cf. Reagan 2001), although there is no question that sign language is distinct from natural languages. The availability of hearing devices and of cochlear implants sharpens the question whether sign language is essential to the cultural survival of the deaf community. In Australia at the policy and professional level, the Deaf (note the capitalisation) are deemed to have their own language, Auslan, and culture in the same way as other linguistic minorities.
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Kaplan, R.B., Baldauf, R.B. (2003). Language Planning in Australia. In: Language and Language-in-Education Planning in the Pacific Basin. Language Policy, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0145-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0145-7_9
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