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Keywords: Languages

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The struggle to resist linguistic empires

    • Ellena Savage
    • 06 July 2012
    10 Comments

    Letting languages disappear is a crime against humanity, asserted a recent article. But reader comments shouted that if a language could not keep up – or rather, if the language was not English – it should die, die, die, as though it were a simple matter of natural selection.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia's story in Indigenous languages

    • Brian McCoy
    • 13 February 2012
    17 Comments

    I will never forget the look on her face. I had asked her a simple question. But I had used her language. She seemed shocked that a white person would even try. Indigenous languages offer rich ways to describe and name our world, and valuable insights and knowledge for all Australians.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Songs and stories of Sri Lanka's war

    • Martin Mulligan
    • 23 November 2011
    5 Comments

    After a meal cooked in the distinctive Jaffna way, the multi-talented Professor treated us to a repertoire of his own songs about his mother, victims of the 2004 tsunami, and those who had suffered during the war. Songs and stories of lived experience, translated into all the languages of Sri Lanka, might achieve more than the government's Reconciliation Commission.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Colombian clues to reconciliation

    • Leonel Narvaez
    • 04 December 2009
    2 Comments

    Following decades of socio-political conflict in Colombia, we have come to understand that a poor person with anger is twice poor; that forgiveness is a powerful way of transforming ungrateful memories into new languages; that in the face of irrational violence, victims must offer the irrationality of forgiveness.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    How to talk to Aboriginal students

    • Myrna Tonkinson
    • 13 October 2009
    14 Comments

    Some Aboriginal languages do not distinguish the unvoiced and voiced consonants 'b' and 'p', 'd' and 't', and 'g' and 'k'. Julia Gillard's push to provide 'English as a second language' training to teachers in remote communities can address such language obstacles and help lift levels of Indigenous education.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A linguist's vision for multicultural Australia

    • Michael Clyne
    • 18 November 2008
    6 Comments

    Bilingualism trains the mind and encourages more flexible problem solving. Such qualities go unnoticed in a society with a strong monolingual mindset. Social inclusion policy must also move beyond the socioeconomic dimension to prevent the exclusion of significant sections of Australian society.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    More than Sex and Bloody Soccer

    • Paul Collins
    • 14 November 2008
    2 Comments

    SBS television has been called many things, including the 'sexual broadcasting service', because of the risqué foreign language films that it shows. SBS radio is the ultimate melting pot, a symbol of an inclusive Australian multiculturalism in which different languages and cultures are respected.

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  • CONTRIBUTORS

    Les Wicks

    • Les Wicks
    • 17 May 2007

    Les Wicks has been published in 11 countries and in seven languages. He runs Meuse Press, which focuses on poetry outreach projects. His seventh, most recent book of poetry is Stories of the Feet (Five Islands, 2004). Les Wicks' website

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  • CONTRIBUTORS

    Peter Bakowski

    • Peter Bakowski
    • 17 May 2007

    Born in Melbourne in 1954 to Polish-German parents, Peter Bakowski has been writing poetry for over twenty years. His poems have been published in literary journals wordwide and have been translated into many languages. His first book In the human night  won the Victorian Premiers Award for Poetry.

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