I'm writing this from Singapore, where there are four official languages and many others. As the only one of these that I speak is English, that is how I am getting by — following the (plentiful) street signs and economising my spoken words for maximum comprehension.
As a former British colony in a global culture and economy dominated by English, Singapore demonstrates the function of the language as a lingua franca — a common language between people who do not share the same native language.
A multi-country poll conducted by Pew Research last year found that nearly 70 per cent of Australian participants felt that speaking English is 'very important' to the Australian identity — more important than sharing customs and traditions and much more important than being born here.
Over 250 languages were spoken across the country at the time that English arrived with British colonisation. From these brutal beginnings, English has been a strict marker of the contours of Australianness and continues to centre ethno-national identity. As such, policies around language acquisition tend towards extractive and conservative logics such as 'getting ahead' in business and security, or preserving the tenets of classical western education.
As Misty Adoniou writes in The Conversation, 'There is a clear hierarchy of languages in Australia. English is at the top. Next are the "classical" languages like French and German, particularly when learned at school. These are followed by languages deemed useful for Australia's economic prosperity — e.g. Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese — but only if they are being learned as "foreign" languages. Because that is quite clever, learning a foreign language.
'But if they are languages already spoken in the home, they slip down the hierarchy of languages, into the community languages pile, along with about 245 other languages.'
Adoniou refers here to an important relationship between class, formal education, and language in Australia. 'Bilingualism is considered class privilege in Australia,' explains author and essayist Stephanie Lai. Chinese-Australian by way of Malaysia, Lai tells Eureka Street she was speaking several languages by the time she was five years old as a matter of course.
"Speaking languages other than English at home or in communities has a lower status than official academic achievement in the study of specific languages."
However, as Adoniou observes, while 'about 20 per cent of the Australian population speaks a language other than English' and '250 languages are spoken in homes around the country', there is little connection between