A multilingual Australia?
The Rudd government has launched a modest initiative to encourage increased study of foreign languages at school. The government program is vital, but may not be sufficient.
The Australian government has now launched a $62 million program to encourage school students to learn a second language. Funding for the program was provided in the 2008-9 federal budget.
In the press release this month announcing commencement of the program, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Education, Julia Gillard, noted that fewer than 14 percent of Australian year 12 students are studying a foreign language, and fewer than half of those are studying an Asian one.
Does it matter, or is our Mandarin-speaking prime minister seeking to simply bend students’ proclivities to accord more with his own? After all, English has increasingly become an international lingua franca.
But that is exactly the point, said the Charlemagne columnist in The Economist last week:
English is coming
Feb 12th 2009
From The Economist print editionThe adverse side-effects of the growing dominance of English
[…] Among Europeans born before the second world war, English, French and German are almost equally common. But according to a Eurobarometer survey, 15-to-24-year-olds are five times more likely to speak English as a foreign language than either German or French. Add native speakers to those who have learnt it, and some 60% of young Europeans speak English "well or very well".
This is a clear win for English. But paradoxically, it does not amount to a win for Europe’s native English-speakers. […]
Such parochialism may be linked to a fall in language-learning, accelerated since 2003, when foreign languages became voluntary in England and Wales for pupils over 14. That robs them of such benefits as the humility and respect for others that come from learning another language. But given the rise of English, it is rational, says Philippe van Parijs, a Belgian academic.
Under his "maxi-min rule", Mr van Parijs observes that speakers at EU meetings automatically choose the language that excludes the fewest people in the room. They do not use the language best known, on average, by those present (which in some meetings will still be French). Instead, they seek the language that is understood, at least minimally, by all. Thanks to EU enlargement to the east (and poor language skills among British and Irish visitors to Brussels), this is almost always English. That means Britons find it ever harder to justify learning other languages. Even when they do, they have to speak other languages extremely well to avoid inflicting halting French, say, on rooms of fluent English-speakers. And it carries other costs. In Brussels, native English-speakers are notoriously hard for colleagues to understand: they talk too fast, or use obscure idioms.
Mr van Parijs has a prediction: Europeans will become bilingual, except for Anglophones, who are becoming monolingual.
Much the same is true of Australia’s Asian trading partners: English is a lingua franca, although we should not write off an emerging role for Mandarin in this respect. (There are estimated to be 432 million English language internet users, a number that doubled between 2000 and 2008, but there are 276 million Chinese language users, a number that went up by a factor of seven over the same period.) But , as Charlemagne observes, to speak another’s language is to express respect for and a willingness to understand another’s culture. Kevin Rudd has made an impact in China that eluded his predecessors and Barack Obama’s progress is being closely followed in Indonesia.
The Economist tends to practice what it preaches. Its Beijing correspondent, James Miles, is a fluent Mandarin speaker. This may have contributed to the fact that he was the only Western journalist in Lhasa when rioting broke out in March last year, and was able to roam around, largely unimpeded by bureaucracy.
Forty percent of Australians are immigrants or have at least one parent who was. It would be a grievous waste of that heritage if the nation were not to seek engagement on equal cultural terms with our neighbours and our trading partners. The government initiative may be too timid: perhaps the goal should be a diversely bilingual nation.
But the initiative is, at least, a start.
olgabodrova
February 24, 2009 at 11:43 pm
advertisement for national myopia
Thank you Mike for this blog, very important and timely.
Warren Reed is another Open Forum blogger who shares your views and has written extensively on the subject – see, for example, his earlier pieces "Seeing Beyond the Words in Language", "Walking the Talk", "Asian Studies and the Myth That One Size Fits All".
He calls this increasing reliance on English as a lingua franca "a national attitudinal malaise" that is "recognised more easily by outsiders than by Australians themselves" – and I totally agree.
Ellen
February 25, 2009 at 12:31 am
language defines how we perceive the world
Australia’s need to learn languages other than English is not just about our place in the region or the world. Nor is it about our ability to do business with as many people as possible.
Language defines our perceptions. It provides us with a lens through which we interpret the world. Different peoples see the world differently and those differences are reflected in their languages.
When we talk about translational challenges between English and French for example we are not talking about finding the right word. In fact we are talking about making significant philosophical bridges between different cultures and paradigms.
Alternate languages allow us to expand our perceptual horizons and exercise our imaginations. In a world where mediocrity and fear are on the rise, why not give our children the tools to critically engage with their world at the most sophisticated level?