Update on more positive experiences re attitudes to bilingualism, Hannah: post-natal/early childhood care in a not so multicultural area includes advice on bilingualism. Both midwives and child and family health nurses have brought up the topic of using L1 with baby on numerous visits – when they heard my accent. I think it’s a good sign that this issue is recognised at all, especially outside the more multicultural centres.

You might have read Robert Lane Greene’s “You are what you speak”. I remember him saying that despite the USA’s reputation as the great cultural melting pot, linguists call it the “graveyard of languages”. He remarks that despite the fears of the far-right Republican Tea Party “English Only” types, the children of today’s migrants to the US are becoming mono-lingual Anglophones just as surely as those before them.

According to Greene even Spanish speakers are being assimilated at almost the same rate as other migrants, and it’s only the steady flow of new arrivals that maintains a significant Spanish speaking community. I expect the assimilationist pressures are just as strong, if not stronger, in Australia.

As you’ve observed it’s fairly common for migrant parents NOT to pass their mother tongue on to the second generation. I expect language transmission to the third generation must be extremely rare, even where both parents are second generation and bi-lingual in English and the same other language (be it Italian, Greek , Chinese or whatever). Perhaps there are some very tightly “sealed” communities highly defined by a common religion where it does happen, such as some orthodox Jews in the US who continue to use Yiddish, but I can’t think of any in Australia.

Is there any way you can share your email with me? I would love to ask you some questions because you and I seem to be in the same language/culture field and it would be great to receive some of your insight.

Dear Hanna

Your thoughts together with your imminent Doctorate give you a deserved forum for changing attitudes. Your work is key to opening minds and to the step by step empathizing on the part of mono lingual Australia as to the challenges faced by multilingual citizens born abroad and their kids . Reading between your lines I feel you might agree with me that the White Paper is flawed (how so?) as far as language tuition is concerned in our school system vis-a-vis most schools and most kids. Perhaps the best way forward is enhanced bipartisanship which, importantly as a precondition, sanctions the appointment of a plenipotentiary Commission. A predetermined fixed choice or position, whether taken by proponents of a universal auxiliary language or by supporters of a national language as in ‘English for all’ or by advocates of a vast multiculturalism program tends to limit true consultation and even to hamper the establishing of such a Commission. The Australian government in its recent 700 page White Paper – Australia in the Asian Century – calls on the nation’s schools to start emphasizing Asian languages, specifically – Bahasa Indonesian, Hindi, Japanese and Mandarin. Though not stated directly the policy paper implies, by recommending Asian languages for Aussie kids, that English is hardly the lingua franca fait accompli for the whole of Asia or for Australia as opined in some circles. That Arabic’s widespread usage isn’t cited indicates that more consultation may com

There are 2 different problems though. Migrants have to learn English if they live in an English speaking country, but native speakers should realise how difficult and time-consuming it is and that English pronunciation is very hard.

The other problem is to expect everyone to learn English, even if they have no intention of visiting an English-speaking country. About that problem there was a very interesting talk by a Chinese Esperanto speaker at the Esperanto conference I attended earlier this month in Germany. The Chinese government wants every child to learn English, which causes lots of problems. The average child has no motivation, his self-esteem is going down as English seems very difficult and illogical, an enormous amount of time is wasted that could be used for more useful purposes, etc. In any case according to the Chinese speaker it would be much, much better to teach English only to those interested and not impose it on everyone, he thinks that Chinese children suffer a lot in their education by the way English is imposed onto them.

I think that in the case of Japan, we mostly have
the wrong facial features for the ones that we do not look as Japanese,
wrong accent for the Japanese descents from Latin America –at least from my research–
and the wrong language for many that we have other native language or
we are not English native speakers –the language of social prestige.
I would like to hear more from your work!