Migration, Heritage Languages and Changing Demographics in Australia

Abstract

Australia has always been multilingual, with over 250 indigenous languages spoken at the time of White Settlement in 1788 (Clyne, 1991, p. 6). But multilingualism has sat uneasily alongside the "monolingual mindset" (Clyne, 2005) that the British colonists brought with them and it has been a point of policy dispute, linked to fears of social fragmentation, throughout the history of modern Australia. We see this uneasiness most dearly in the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 (Commonwealth of Australia, 1902), more commonly known as the White Australia Policy, which included a language proficiency instrument aimed at excluding people whose linguistic, cultural, political, and racial identities were considered undesirable. Drawing on census data, past and present trends in migration, and attitudes towards immigrant heritage languages (HLs) in Australia, this chapter looks at issues and challenges for widespread use and maintenance of HLs in immigrant communities between the mid-1900s and the present. Indigenous languages will not be a focus of the chapter. We discuss several aspects of the HL situation in Australia with an eye on implications for current and future HL education. The next section provides a brief historical overview of Australia's language-in-migration policy and early developments in HL policy. In the third section the discussion turns to demographic information drawn from the 2011 census and analyzes internal variations within and across immigrant communities as well as patterns of HL maintenance and use across generations. The key questions addressed in this section are: What can we learn about the HL situation from census data on home language(s)? What do census data hide and reveal about issues of HL diversity? The fourth section, focusing on new waves of migrants from multilingual backgrounds, follows; in this section, we look at the language profiles and language practices of African migrants to illustrate how their complex language use patterns both confirm and challenge traditional and bureaucratic approaches to documenting HLs. The last paragraph of this section draws attention to the politics of Mandarin Chinese and the enormous difficulties in equitably assessing HL learners of Mandarin in Australia. The fifth section concludes by showing linkages between the history of Australian immigration and current HL policy developments. In the concluding section we also provide some reflections on implications for a more progressive, dynamic, and versatile HL education policy for Australia and other comparable international contexts.