...] level in a foreign language higher than being able to bargain in a marketplace are considered either very intelligent or even slightly mystical. The whitepaper itself says: Most students in most highly developed education systems around the [...

Christian, the case of German is a particularly interesting one in Australia. There was a large bi-lingual population west of the Divide, from Queensland to South Australia, and German is still the second most common language spoken at home in the Riverina. The language tended to disappear from public view after the outbreak of WWI.

As for senior I’m assuming the irony alert went missing in cyberspace.

There is a flipside to this lack of common history. I feel, that many australians try to make up for this by ignoring what a potpourri they really are. they do this by glorifying the recent history (especially on ANZAC day) and by overemphasizing the English language and by appealing to an “australian identity”. seniors reply (above) exemplifies this rather well. especially politicians like to point to these “australian values”. I always ask people, but no one can define it any further than “vegemite” and “mateship”. the whole idea sounds a bit like americans trying to define themselves as WASPs.
I don’t want to knock australians. things are not better in germany. german politicians like to speak of what they call “Leitkultur”. This is meant to be something that all germans share (sauerkraut? punctuality?). No one can define it, but of course it is always invoked in discussions about immigration. The last position that is alaways defended by “leitkultur” proponents is always the german language. Language seems to central role in ingroup/outgroup definitions. But to me the questions arises: If germans cannot agree on a “leitkultur” how could aussies ever agree on a set of distinctly “australian values”??

it should be clear now which is the higher level that I mentioned in the beginning. it is a very narrow concept of a nation state (or nationalism?). it is a concept which does not tolerate multilingualism, let alone multiculturalism. this is old-fashioned thinking in germany, because the place has become an immigrant country over the last 40years. in australia such a mindset is a plain denial of the facts. australia has always been an immigrant country. I think the denial or denigration of multilingualism is just the flipside of this particular concept of a nation-state.

by the way: does anyone know if the australian constitution mentions the English language? the U.S. constitution doesn’t. and the Grundgesetz doesn’t mention German. However, in the U.S. and in Germany it is the rightwingers that are trying to change it.

You are a right xenophobic ‘spanker’ (replace the ‘sp’ with a ‘w’).

Maybe this sentiment is part of the problem – how can Australia be described as monolingual when an abundance of languages are spoken here? There’s nothing monolingual about it – millions of NESB migrants, their descendants and Australia’s original inhabitants would testify to this… A statement like this presumes to speak on behalf of ‘Australians’, but excludes precisely that demographic it would defend.

But it’s not just Greg; this is something I hear widely repeatedly, including at my sandstone tower: ‘We’re so monolingual it’s embarrassing’. What they mean is, ‘I am an Anglo-Australian and therefore statistically likely to be monolingual, and have furthermore just as hard a time fitting EFL speakers into the category ‘Australian’ as those who (like Senior above) do so for xenophobic reasons.’ It’s just one of those vaguely guilt-ridden things said by well-intentioned progressives without too much critical thought – maybe harmless, but worth flagging, I thought. This is not sarcasm, I’m sure it really is said with good faith; it’s just wrong-headed. Self-reflexivity can’t hurt our cause, can it?

As a side note, I have taught languages and find that if adult students are reluctant to own up to speaking multiple languages it’s often because of a kind of modesty – a reluctance to attract the admiration, praise or jealousy of other students. I’ve interpreted that as a general valuation of linguistic dexterity combined with a fear of being the tall poppy… but that might be the case only in a LOTE classroom, and my interpretation may of course be wrong.

I have noticed that there is almost pride in not being able to correctly pronounce foreign words and place names, above and beyond our local dialect of English and its natural distortions of vowel sounds. In academia, I hasten to add.

I can’t say I’ve ever encountered this, *anywhere*. Quite the opposite, if anything. The closest I’ve ever seen would be someone chuckling at themselves because they can’t pronounce a word.

Australians’ monolingualism is, as Holden points out, basically about laziness: [...]

I think this is grossly unfair. Additional languages are – except for a few gifted individuals – very difficult (particularly for adults) to learn and maintain without frequent interaction with fluent speakers (ie: immersion). For most English speaking natives, this immersion is relatively difficult to find (all the Anglo countries are relatively geographically isolated), and for Australians probably the hardest of all.

I can’t think of anyone I know who is multilingual that doesn’t fall into one or more of:
* living somewhere with a native language different than their mother tongue
* spent substantial time (multiple years) living in a non-English-speaking country
* had parents send them to extra-curricular language classes from a very young age
* has a job that requires being fluent in another language
* mother/father/wife/girlfriend/etc isn’t a native English speaker
* exceptionally intelligent

The vast majority of Australians don’t fit into any of the above, because that’s just the way it is, not because they’re “lazy”.

By the way, I suspect that Greg is at least as Australian as you…

“…children raised bilingually develop a specific type of cognitive benefit during infancy, and … bilingualism offers some protection against symptoms of Alzheimer’s dementia in old people.”

Bilingual children have a greater level of cognitive flexibility than their monolingual peers, mainly due to the fact that they have to be constantly selecting sounds, words and grammatical structures from one of their two (or more) languages. Such children perform better at psychological tasks designed to ‘trick’ subjects with rule changes and misleading information:

“That selective attention involves a set of processes, termed executive function, that reside in the prefrontal cortex and develop especially over the first 5 years of life. Evidently, shifting frequently and unpredictably between hearing two parental languages made “bilingual” infants better able to cope with other unpredictable rule changes.”

Bilingualism shows measurable positive effects later in life as well:

“Among hundreds of elderly Canadian patients with a probable Alzheimer’s diagnosis, bilingual patients showed their first symptoms at an age 5 years older than did monolingual patients matched in other respects. Canadian life expectancy is
79, hence a 5-year delay for people in their 70’s translates into a 47% decreased probability that they will develop Alzheimer’s symptoms at all before they die.”

“How might this be? A short answer is the aphorism, “Use it or lose it.” Exercising body systems improves their function; not exercising them lets their function deteriorate. That’s why athletes and musicians practice. It’s also why Alzheimer’s patients are encouraged to play brain-challenging games like bridge or
to solve Sudoku puzzles. But bilingualism is arguably the most constant practice possible for the brain… bilinguals impose extra exercise on their brain every minute of their waking hours. Consciously or unconsciously, the bilingual brain constantly has to decide: Shall I think, speak, or interpret sounds spoken to me according to the arbitrary rules of language A or language B?”

These are just the known effects of bilingualism, that scientists can talk about with a degree of certainty. There may, of course, be many more such cognitive benefits that have not yet been studied in any detail. In any case, the above discussion is not meant to divert attention from Greg’s important point, which is that there is already a significant level of bi-/multilingualism in Australia. This appears not to be appreciated by either policy makers, or the mainstream public.

The quotes used in this post are from Diamond, J. (2010) The benefits of multilingualism, Science, vol. 3302: pp. 332-333.

I was posting about News Ltd’s angle of implying that Rudd speaking the language of a particular nation means he supports the government and politics of that country over his own. Nothing to do with Swan.