This is my grandmother’s stock way of saying that someone tripped or fell. She arrived in Australia from Italy in 1959, and she still has some issues with speaking and reading English. Though she can read and speak standard Italian, and also has full mastery of a regional Italian variety, she most likely wouldn’t pass the English-based Australian citizenship test which was introduced in 2007 (though she has picked up words like ‘mate’ and ‘bludger’ which could work in her favour). The controversy surrounding the citizenship test has largely died away, but we should continue to question this continued push for official English monolingualism which underpins Australia’s language policy, both within governments and within society.

English is widely perceived as Australia’s national language. However, this is not set in constitutional stone; as Greg Dickson has commented, Federal Parliament has been slow to even recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages as the first languages of Australia, let alone to openly declare English as the sole official language (wouldn’t that seem in stark contrast to that Multicultural Policy they’ve recently introduced?).

The test imposes a legal requirement that prospective citizens have a ‘basic knowledge of the English language’: in typical legislative fashion, what ‘basic knowledge’ might mean is left delightfully vague. The explanatory video ‘Our Common Bond’ about Australian society and values proclaims that the national language is indeed English. On what basis? Well, according to the 2011 Census, 76.8% of Australians speak only English at home: though English may have a de facto position as the main language of Australia (in a thoroughly monolingual sense), there is no legislative support for the Australian government to insist that future citizens speak English as well.

The Government has provided the resource booklet intended to help applicants prepare for the test in 37 other languages, but the test itself can only be taken in English. The Department of Immigration and Citizenship’s website explicitly states that ‘there is not a separate English language test’, but is the test itself not implicitly examining applicants’ level of English? Certainly, applicants can prepare for the test in a vast array of languages, but how might they apply the knowledge they have acquired in these varieties to answer questions given in a language that may be largely alien to them?

An eerie historical parallel emerges between the language requirements of the citizenship test and the notorious dictation test under the Immigration Restriction Act 1901. Though not framed in terms of ethnicity, the Act allowed Australian immigration officials to subject all incoming individuals to a dictation test of 50 words in any European language as a basis for entering the country. You could have brilliant language skills in your own language, but could be forced to sit a test completely unknown to you (this system sounds familiar, eh?). Even speaking English as a first language didn’t seem to help—just look what happened to Mabel Freer, having to sit the test in Italian (and inevitably failing).  This comparison shows Australia’s long-standing and infamous habit for using language skills to filter future citizens. So much for progress…

The ironically titled Moving Forward, a 2008 independent report, found that the level of English required to pass the Australian citizenship test was unnecessarily advanced, and recommended that the Government develop citizenship information resources and test materials in simple English (which they happily agreed to do). It also recommended civics courses in languages other than English (which they happily refused to do). Furthermore, it criticised the citizenship process as assuming that all applicants are literate in any language, which may not be the case, particularly for individuals entering Australia via refugee and humanitarian channels. An ‘Assisted Test’ is offered to applicants with English literacy problems, but only to those who have completed at least 400 hours of English language tuition under the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) and are then officially assessed and declared to not possess the English literacy skills necessary for the test. If applicants can still be assessed as possessing inadequate English skills after 400 hours of language tuition, this raises serious questions about the level of English that the citizenship test demands.

It appears the citizenship test acts as an implicit gate-keeping device, but there’s no obligation to actually use English once you’re here. Australia: multicultural, with a monolingual fence. Please don’t flook as you walk in the door.

Ben Purser is a 3rd-year Linguistics major at ANU. He is interested in phonetic variation and sociolinguistics, and is fairly proficient in Italian and ‘Kath-and-Kim’ English, much to the annoyance of his friends.  Current projects include drinking tea and fretting about developing an Honours topic.

It was only recently that I commented on LCNAU’s call for Australia’s leaders to lead by example by learning and using Asian languages in the public domain. Although I surely can’t take full credit for the sudden (small) increase in non-English coming from political statements, I won’t rule out the possibility of my influence.

The Prime Minister, who admits to being a Game of Thrones fan, tweeted in Dothraki (already blogged in The Guardian here), the language of a warrior culture in George R R Martin’s Game of Thrones, using the official @JuliaGillard account, signed JG. Although Dothraki is not elaborated upon in the books, the Language Creation Society developed the language for the television show based on the them.

.@jordanbader1 Not addicted – me allayafa anna! #gameofthrones JG

— Julia Gillard (@JuliaGillard) May 27, 2013

I can’t help but wonder if she is the first Head of State to publicly use a constructed language. Coming soon in the exciting future of Australian political linguistics: question time in Klingon! Electoral ballots in Elvish!

The Language and Cultures Network of Australian Universities (LCNAU) has called for the politicians to set an example and learn Asian languages. If politicians are seen publicly using Asian languages, they say, it will encourage others to put in the effort to learn them also. The opposite is also true: when politicians do not use other languages in public, it suggests that it is not important to learn and use other languages.

Kevin Rudd provided the example, and it was a source of reactions from fascination to ridicule to apathy. Since he took a back seat role, few, if any public figures in Australia have used other languages publicly.

The call from LCNAU is  specific to Asian languages, but in reality, any language use by public figures (be they politicians, media, or just plain celebrities) is good for the cause of demystifying monolingualism. What is important is that Australians learn that speaking, reading, hearing and writing other languages is not magical, nor is it impossible. Learning a language well can be difficult, but it is worth the effort.

Australia has a wealth of linguistic potential in its immigrant communities and their descendants, indigenous communities, and those who have studied languages in school and university, but their potential is hidden away. People speak all sorts of languages in their homes and in their acquaintance, but it rarely becomes public language. Even when employed to use their language skills, they work in the background. With the example of public figures themselves using language skills in public, others, young and old, have a better reason to put in the effort to learn a second language, and less reason to be suspicious or in awe of those who have done so.

It’s almost too dull to point out that English is the dominant language of pop in Europe. This year was actually a rather strong year for national-language entries in the grand final – 8 of the 26 choosing to sing in a language other than English. Of course Spain, France and Italy all had entries in their national language. More interestingly so did Estonia and Hungary – neither Hungarian or Estonian have an international pop market, but they are both languages that are very distinct from their neighbours, so perhaps there is an element of national pride there. Moldova again chose a national-language song – and I learnt Modovan is a dialect of Romanian, proving the educational worth of Eurovision. Also, when you look as much like a viking as Eyþór Ingi does, it only makes sense that you sing in your native Icelandic.

Greece was the only country to use the strategy of having a song in the national language, but resorting to English in the chorus for general cross-over appeal. This was a popular strategy last year, and with the lyrics of the chorus consisting of “alcohol is free” (repeat) it wasn’t entirely clear that this wasn’t sponsored by the Greek tourism board. 3 of the 8 non-English songs made it into the top 10 (Greece 6th, Italy 7th, Hungary 10th), indicating that it’s still possible to make it into the top 10 without English.

There was a disappointing lack of minority language representation this year – after the Udmurt singers from Russia last year, and France’s Corsican entry in 2011. It appears that the risk of the exotic entrant may only be a luxury for more prosperous times.

Of course, when it comes to Eurovision, the singing is only half the fun. When it comes to language politics, the voting is gives a whole new perspective. Of the 39 countries participating in the voting all but three chose to give their votes in English – Belguim, France and Switzerland all showed Francophone pride. While English and French may be the two official language of Eurovision, it’s clear that English is not just the international language of pop, but of media more generally.

Interestingly, host Petra showed her multilingual flair by greeting the voters from several countries in their home language. Pleasantries in Italian, Spanish, French and German from our Swedish host (correlating with those countries general preference for singing in their national language) shows that there is still cachet in the Eurozone for speaking the ‘classy’ Western European languages. More encouragingly, hosts from Israel, Estonia and FYR Macedonia all gave extended thanks to the host country in Swedish – showing some acknowledgement of the national language. I also give props to Slovenia and Croatia for giving their thanks in their own languages (before switching to English to give their results).

So we’ll be hopping across the boarder in 2014 to Denmark. Despite the supposed threat from Eastern Europe, it appears that the Scandinavians are working their English pop nous and shaggy hair  too well to be stopped.

[This post also appeared on Superlinguo]

Embodying the fantasy of having your cake and eating it too, the magic pudding provides an apt and peculiarly Australian symbol for any overreaching political promises. In Lindsay’s immortal passage:

A peculiar thing about the Puddin’ was that, though they had all had a great many slices off him, there was no sign of the place whence the slices had been cut.
“That’s where the Magic comes in,” explained Bill. “The more you eats the more you gets. Cut-an’-come-again is his name, an’ cut, an’ come again, is his nature. Me an’ Sam has been eatin’ away at this Puddin’ for years, and there’s not a mark on him.”

This is by no means the first time the metaphor has been served up in recent years. It was actually used to describe Wayne Swan’s previous budget (see this Fairfax headline), and prior to that, Senator Richard di Natale used it in reference to a Coalition policy (“Tony Abbott wants credit for the Greens’ Denticare plan but his magic pudding can’t deliver”).

I’d like to believe that it was Paul Keating who introduced the expression when he told the Wall Street Journal in 1982 that “The days of the magic pudding are gone in Australia. You can’t go and have a slice and come back and find it isn’t diminished. We can’t turn our back on growth and go on writing massive welfare checks.” But in fact,  disparaging references to the ‘magic pudding’ have been a feature of Australian political since at least 1948, when Liberal member Jo Gullet made a relatively lengthy reference to Lindsay’s tale. Curiously, Gullet did not treat the pudding as a representation of the fantastical promise of bounty with no consequences. Instead he invoked a subplot of the story to illustrate what he took to be an unofficial and improper political alliance between Labour and the Communist party, characterised by asymmetrical generosity :

The attitude adopted towards Communists by the Australian Labour party reminds one of the case of the Earl of Buncle in The Magic Pudding. In case honorable members have forgotten The Magic Pudding, I shall outline the circumstances. The Earl of Buncle was on one occasion in very great trouble, and he was saved from his difficulties by a character called Sam the Sailor. But when the whole affair had passed over did the Earl of Buncle demonstrate his gratitude to Sam the Sailor and give him his niece in marriage? No, he did not actually do that, but what he did is recounted in the book as follows: – “You are a noble fellow,” said the Earl of Buncle, “and here is us. [sic] for your trouble. Any time you are around our way, just give a ring on the back door and there will always be a feed for you on the kitchen table and a few bob.”

That is exactly the position obtaining between the Australian Labour party and the Communist party to-day. Members of the Communist party have been “around the back door” pretty often, and they have always found a “feed on the table” and a “few bob”.

Presumably, Joe Hockey would be wanting to identify with the prudence of the Earl of Buncle who refused to make fantastical promises he couldn’t deliver on. Whatever the case, The Magic Pudding appears to be an infinitely renewable source of political metaphors.

We have a pretty good idea of what humans were up to 15,000 years ago. We know that Homo Sapiens were the last surviving branch of the human species after the extinction of Homo floresiensis. The crazy idea of agriculture was about to take off, and a place that would come to be known as ‘America‘ was possibly settled. But while we know about the migration and lives of our ancestors 15 millennia ago, we don’t know anything about the language they spoke – beyond guessing that they had one (there were likely very many already). Spoken language is a fragile thing, changing and evolving across the generations.

A paper this week published by an international collaboration of scientists aims to peer into the murky depths of linguistic prehistory. They look at 7 language families that range from the western edges of Europe to the Inuit languages of North America. They took a word list of 200 basic words, working on the rationale that these are less likely to change over time than less basic/frequently used words. They then used existing constructed etymologies of what these words might have looked like at the earliest points for all of these language families (which is, itself, controversial), and then worked out whether these cognates could be used to work out the words at even greater time-depth.

The process of using known language data to work out earlier language is a methodology that has been around since the 1780s, when William Jones noticed that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit were all too similar for it to be coincidence. This is how we have come to understand the relationship of various languages in Europe, and to figure out where groups have moved over time. For example, we can tell from language similarities that Romany (the language of European Gypsies) originated in India. Most linguists who work in the area of historical linguistics don’t believe reconstructions of this type are reliable beyond about 6000 years of time depth. This is because words change sufficiently fast that after 6,000-10,000, there are too few words in common to be able to reliably distinguish similarities due to shared ancestry from chance resemblances.

So how have they gone back so far in this paper? Although they looked at 7 language families, many of the words only appeared in four or fewer families, in fact there was an average of 2.3 languages where each cognate was found. So this is only a partial picture, at best. Also, they chose to only look at language families that were next door to each other. It would have been good to throw in another language family that was more distant (such as the Trans-New Guinea family), to see whether similar links could be found between language families that are known to be entirely unrelated – i.e., whether the links they are finding could be coincidental. This would have provided some basis for evaluating the degree of support for their tree. And while they do make some effort to control for this, but when the underlying etymologies from the words are so questionable that it’s already based on a questionable basis.

There is a much more in-depth discussion from Sally Thomason over on Language Log about the limitations of the data, and the problems of this kind of analysis, and readers who aren’t daunted by some of the more technical aspects of the discussion are encouraged to read it.

This isn’t the first time that a group of scientists have tried applying statistical methods to historical language data, and it probably won’t be the last. While linguists acknowledge that we can’t reliably reconstruct anything over about 6000 years old, the seduction of trying to find the ‘ur-language’ – the postulated first human language – will always bring new challengers, and an eager media.

Chook lit

John Abbott was amused by a comment from Claire, his librarian wife, who described the book she was reading at the weekend as ‘chook lit’ or … “chick lit for the older woman”.’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 29 October, 2004)

Here the use of chook ‘an old woman’ is a pun on chick ‘a woman or girl’. Chook lit was thus originally the preserve of the middle-aged baby boomer generation, who want to read about women with a little more life under their belt than the twenty-somethings. This sense of chook lit (which, as one wit puts it, is probably better than ‘old boiler books’) continues until 2011, when it is hijacked by another literary genre—rural romance fiction:

She is a pioneer of ‘chook lit’—a rural romance genre her publishers say is a red hot winner. Rural romance is snaring the hearts and minds of women readers from city and country. (Melbourne Sunday Herald Sun, 16 October, 2011)

Here the chook part of chook lit is also playing on the sense of chook meaning ‘chicken’. Indeed, real chooks do appear in these novels as part of the scenery, as do other features of outback life—utes, B & S balls, kelpies, cattle, rodeos, home preserving, big rigs, and Blunnies. Certainly a sense of humour is present; you can find innuendo about the size of a bloke’s tractor, for instance. But there is also a belief that outback traditions and values are a more authentically Australian experience than can be found in the city, as this description of a B & S ball illustrates:

Rural youth, defiant and proud, who had turned their backs on the consumerism and political correctness that had infiltrated through Australia’s cities. … Here, in this paddock on this weekend, there’d be no designer drugs. No doof-doof music. No baggy skate pants revealing bumcracks. … Instead, Kate knew there’d be booze and boots and ‘bloody-oath, mates’ and good, old-fashioned piss-wrecked fun. (Rachael Treasure, The Rouseabout, 2007)

The rural romance is the literary genre of the moment in Australia. A variety of romance fiction, the rural romance is set in outback Australia on farms, on cattle stations, and in small bush communities. These books are written largely by female writers who live in rural and regional Australia, or who have had some experience of doing so. First-hand descriptions of life on the land—shearing, mustering, harvesting, agricultural shows, field days, wool-classing, dog trials—are a feature of this genre, and seem to be aimed squarely at an Australian readership; there are few apparent concessions to an international audience in the use of language in these works. It is hard to know, for example, what a northern hemisphere reader would make of ‘hoggets’ who have been ‘freshly wigged and crutched’ (i.e. weaned lambs that have not yet been shorn, with wool clipped from around their tails and eyes) in Treasure’s novel The Rouseabout.
Rural romance (from authors such as Treasure, Nicole Alexander, Fiona Palmer, and Fleur McDonald) is increasing in popularity, and the evidence for this sense of chook lit suggests that it has now largely overtaken the earlier meaning of the term, ‘fiction for the older reader’.
Both senses of chook lit are being considered for inclusion in the second edition of the Australian National Dictionary.

This article originally appeared as Oxford Australia’s Word of the Month for May 2013. You can subscribe to Word of the Month as well as Ozwords here.

I must admit, the new version of the word does irk me a little bit (typical response of a GenX-er, I suppose) but I’m mostly okay with it. But there is one aspect to this new word that does really interest me: how to spell it.

Most people use the spelling totes. It’s pretty obvious, right. It takes the first three letters of the mother word and simply adds –es as we do with many other English words. It seems like a straightforward and sensible spelling choice.

Until we consider the alternative: toats. (Yes, this spelling exists. Look it up on Twitter to see that it’s being used every few minutes).

As soon as I saw the toats spelling, I was enamoured. You see, totes is already a word in English. They’re a kind of bag that girls wearing large sunglasses carry with them to the beach. Toats, on the other hand, is unique and interesting. It kind of looks like breakfast but it isn’t. But the best thing about that spelling is that it typographically divorces it from its original form. By spelling the word toats, it comes of age, stands on its own two feet and tells the world that it’s here to stay. Toats no longer needs pocket money from its parents. It’s got a job and a role in society – to annoy and confuse people over 50. Which is precisely what language change has been doing since time began.

So please allow me to indulge in being a prescriptive linguist for just a moment and urge you to embrace the spelling toats.

Or don’t. Watevs.

*Society may not actually exist

Both were important because they acknowledged groups of people who have been marginalised, but they were also important because they illustrated the importance of language when talking to, and about, marginalised groups.

The government announced that the NDIS would now be known as DisabilityCare. The intention appears to be to align it in the public mind with Medicare, but such branding – while it may seem benign to most Australians – is very loaded for disability advocates. As Ramp Up editor Stella Young notes, disabled people are trying desperately to move away from care-based ideas of disability, which is tied up in notions that disabled people can’t look after themselves. The NDIS however, is about providing enough funding for disability services to give disabled people autonomy where feasible. Regardless of how forward-thinking the NDIS is, using such a loaded term in the re-branding was always likely to offend many disabled people.

On the very day the ALP exploded all over itself, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott both made national apologies to those who were affected by the practice of forced adoptions in Australia from the 1950s to the 1970s. While Gillard’s apology was generally well received by those who attended, Tony Abbott’s words of condolence did not go down so well. In his speech he used terms including “relinquish” (which implies some amount of choice in the matter), and “birth-parents” (which implies that their role their children’s lives is but a biological process). Much like the word “care” in a disability services context, these words are weighted with negative and hurtful attitudes for the parents and children who were forced apart, often by coercion. Abbott’s use of these words was out of ignorance, not malice, and he immediately retracted them.

Given that the Senate report on forced adoptions discussed the fact that the language of adoption, then and now, harmed those who suffered under the practice, and reading just how horrific it was for many of the young women, it highlights the need to know how to talk to, and about, marginalised groups, especially from a position of relative power. People with disabilities, and those who suffered under the practice of forced adoptions, are two very different groups of people, however both have been marginalised by society, both in action and in the language used to talk about them. Even though both the renaming of NDIS to DisabilityCare and Abbott’s use of “relinquish” and “birth-parents” may not have been intentionally offensive, when a group of people have suffered so much the least we can do is give them the right to choose the way we talk about these topics.

That report mentioned that Federal funding for Indigenous language programs had stagnated at under $10 million for years and recommended a substantial increase in funding for the Indigenous Languages Support scheme. The Creative Australia policy has acted with:

Provide new funding of $13.983 million over four years to develop new community-driven language resources and activities, an extension of the Indigenous Languages Support program…

(I don’t know why they couldn’t chuck in an extra $17,000 and make it a clean $14 million, but I digress…)

I have a vested interested in this issue as I provide volunteer support and services to a language centre already funded by the Federal Government. And after reviewing Creative Australia, my initial reaction is conflicted. The increase in funding is incredibly welcome and will undoubtedly be put to good use by the dozens of community and grassroots Indigenous language projects and organisations that bubble away across the nation. But does $14 million over four years equate to the recommendation of a ‘substantial increase in funding’ that the Creative Australia policy is responding to? I’m not convinced.

$14 million dollars over four years across 250 Indigenous languages equals out to $14,000 in new funding per year, per language. (250 languages is a conservative estimate: the Creative Australia report quotes 600 which would equate to under $6,000 in new funding per year per language). While I’m loathe to look a gift horse in the mouth, I’m not sure that this increase in funding is significant enough to tackle the attrition of Aboriginal languages in Australia or bring about significant community development outcomes, employment or other measures that will contribute to the Closing The Gap framework.

Think about what it takes to resource a struggling language in order to arrest its decline. You need to do things like teach kids language skills (oral and written), train adults to be language teachers and – in the case of many languages – become better speakers of their language. Resources like books and recordings are needed to support these efforts too. It’s a big job. An extra $14,000 can go far, but far enough to bring real outcomes for Indigenous people and their languages? I’m not convinced.

Success stories like the improving fortunes of Maori in New Zealand have been backed by much more significant government funding and support than is given to the sum total of Indigenous languages across our whole continent. So while I, like many others who devote time and energy into supporting Indigenous languages, will appreciate this increase in funding, I believe it falls short of being afforded the label ‘significant’. A few further glimmers of hope in the Creative Australia policy are found tucked away in the appendices. The recommendation to allow Indigenous language organisations to be able receive tax-deductible donations for the first time would be a welcome move, as is the funding increase to AIATSIS for the digitisation of their extraordinary archives that many language projects rely on (Thanks Lauren for pointing this out). But in the meantime, the struggle continues.