Volume 2006, Issue 180

Language contact research in Australia has been greatly stimulated by visits from international leaders in the field. In the 1960s, it was very unusual for overseas scholars of note to visit Australia. Probably the first in our field was Einar Haugen, who came in 1982 and was, incidentally, the first person to give evidence before the Senate Committee exploring the need for a national languages policy for Australia.

This issue grew out of a workshop hosted at the University of Melbourne in May 2003 for international visitors Peter Nelde (Catholic University, Brussels) and Sally Boyd (Göteborg University, Sweden) around the topic of community language practice in Australia. Some twelve papers were presented by local researchers, and there was much lively and fruitful interaction between the presenters and the visitors.

This article focuses on Australia's changing language demography. After providing a short summary of immigration history and language policy in Australia, it considers the national distribution of languages at the time of the 2001 National Census, as well as the differential shift to English in various ethnolinguistic communities. The discussion is based on the analysis of census statistics and provides a context for the languages of the articles in this volume.

Diasporic communities formed as a result of recent migration movements face particular issues and challenges in supporting the intergenerational transmission of their heritage language, especially when the language involved is not one that has high visibility and status in the surrounding society. This article is a case study of a mature migrant community in Melbourne, Australia — people of Maltese background — and aims to explore in some depth factors that are promoting and inhibiting intergenerational language transmission within the community. Two groups of factors are identified — facilitating factors and motivating factors — and these are discussed and related to the experiences and attitudes of the interviewees. The parents interviewed represent two vintages of migration: pre- and post-independence in Malta. Superficially, it appears that the post-independence migrants have a stronger commitment to intergenerational language transmission. However, it is argued that this only partially explains the observed differences. For both vintages, changes in the opportunities for diasporic engagement and in government policy settings in both the homeland and in Australia are creating an environment which is more facilitative of intergenerational language transmission for families motivated to support such transmission.

The Greek community in Australia has been noted for its success in resisting language loss. Most school-age children in the Greek Australian community are now members of the third generation and increasingly vulnerable to language loss. Maintenance of Greek among this group depends on the commitment of parents and children and on the availability of effective language instruction. A survey conducted in a Greek Orthodox school in Melbourne finds that while the parent and child cohorts share an overt commitment to the language, differences emerge in their views of the way it is taught. In particular the student cohort appear to experience some conflict between language loyalty and their daily experience of learning the language.

This article explores the notion of variation within homogeneity, using as a case study a German-speaking Sprachinsel (or linguistic enclave) established in the Western District of Victoria in 1853. The research demonstrates that a language community, even one that is highly concentrated geographically and with a high degree of homogeneity in both background and religious persuasion, is ultimately made up of subgroups and individuals, who may react to internal and external pressures regarding language and language use in quite different ways.

This article explores the role of Italian and Sicilian in the life of a second-generation woman of Sicilian origin. It examines her linguistic practices with family and friends through spontaneous conversations, interviews, and a language diary. The analysis focuses on language choice in relation to different interlocutors as indexical of her multiple identities, and on her language attitudes as they emerge implicitly in the conversations and explicitly in the interviews. The trends identified are explained in the light of the language ideologies prevailing in the Italo-Australian and Australian contexts, giving an insight into the prospects of language maintenance in the transition from second- to third-generation Italo-Australians.

This article is based on a case study of a family with three children who migrated to Australia from German-speaking Switzerland in 1984. It was found that within less than ten years, Swiss-German was substituted by English as the language in the home and today the younger generation use Swiss-German exclusively for communication with their relatives in Switzerland. The article retraces this change in language use and examines how the members of the family recall the language shift and make sense of it. The findings are discussed in terms of the roles played by the family members (in particular by the mother) and in terms of the family's language background.

This article focuses on the level of maintenance of Danish in the Danish community of Melbourne and is based on 34 case studies drawn from a total of 89 interviews with people of Danish ethnic background carried out by Professor Bent Søndergaard in 1994. The informants fall roughly into four groups, the oldest consisting of people who migrated to Australia after the Second World War, and the youngest arriving in Australia in the late 1980s. The results indicate that the tendency to shift to English is more strongly pronounced among the earlier arrivals, while the more recent ones often report a strong wish to maintain Danish as the home language and transmit it to their children. However, the results also demonstrate considerable individual variation within generations, both with regard to the informants' linguistic goals and the actual outcomes.

Our contribution explores the language maintenance (LM) patterns of children of migrants (second-generation) to Australia from three ethnolinguistic groups — German, Greek, and Vietnamese — in their same-age peer friendships. Focusing on the affective social relationship of “friendship” imagined as a dynamic fluid site of independence and a locale for identity formation, we scrutinize it as a pressure point for LM. The macro survey trends indicate that languages other than English (LOTE) are used in the friendship domain but with differing participations. Follow-up in-depth interviews reveal subtleties and complexities for LM practices. Co-presence of bilingual others in friendships proves to be a minimum but not sufficient condition for LM, particularly for German men and Greek women. Hyphenated belongings — for example, Vietnamese-, Greek-, German-Australians — construct varying LM alignments that reflect shared histories and authenticities (the migration experience) and the localizing of settlement (Australia).

Anya Woods: Medium or Message? Language and Faith in Ethnic Churches . Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2004. xii + 219 pp. (Trevor Batrouney)

The Southern Saami language is one of several Saami languages in Scandinavia and Northwest Russia. Today the Southern Saami language is an endangered language; most of the speakers are older people. This article describes an effort to transmit the language to the children in Svahken Sijte, the southernmost reindeer herding community in Norway.