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- Title
Government language policy initiatives and the future of ethnic languages in Australia.
- Authors
Ozolins, Uldis
- Abstract
This article discusses the government language policy initiatives and its important effect upon the future of ethnic languages in Australia. Postwar migration has brought over three million settlers to Australia, over half of them from non-English-speaking countries, and they, together with their offspring, form the bulk of speakers of languages other than English, changing decidedly Australia's assumed monolingualism. To a great extent, it is this migrant influx that has created awareness of other language issues in Australia, and also governed policy response. The influence of the migrant population (and migration to Australia has always been intended for permanent settlement, not for a guest-worker situation) has been a much greater influence on language policy in Australia than have other language issues -- language needs for trade and external affairs, for example, or Australia's own educational tradition of teaching foreign languages. The newer influence of the migrant population has often had to battle against previous and often implicit language policies, particularly relating to the assumption of the universality of English, and the status of other languages in Australia. The recent developments of language policy are thus generally seen as coming under the general rubric of ethnic affairs, or even migrant welfare, which has given these language-policy initiatives both their strength and their current limitations: language policy has continually been hostage to wider social theories of immigrant (and Aboriginal) integration, of social cohesion, of cultural and social hierarchy.
- Subjects
AUSTRALIA; LANGUAGE policy; FOREIGN language education; EMIGRATION &; immigration; MONOLINGUALISM; SOCIAL dominance
- Publication
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 1988, Vol 1988, Issue 72, p113
- ISSN
0165-2516
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/ijsl.1988.72.113