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Keywords: Languages

  • AUSTRALIA

    When a friend writes a controversial post, how should you respond?

    • Barry Gittins
    • 10 July 2024

    How do you respond, when members of your own tribe share their distaste towards those who rub them up the wrong way? Do you ‘unfollow’? Do you engage? And if you vent against those who who offend with their own dearth of tolerance, are you guilty of doing the same?  

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  • AUSTRALIA

    How to revive a language

    • Natasha Moore
    • 31 May 2023
    1 Comment

    250 years ago, hundreds of Indigenous languages were spoken in Australia. Today, only 3 percent survive. This echoes a painful narrative of dispossession of land, lives, and culture. But can a long-dormant language be brought back to life? A key figure in the resurgence of the Noongar language offers hope against the backdrop of cultural loss.

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  • RELIGION

    Handing on a tradition

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 October 2021
    44 Comments

    One of the challenges facing churches today has to do with tradition. Tradition is a sometimes charged word, but it refers to an everyday social need. It has to do with how a community passes on its way of life and its understanding of authoritative writings that shape it. The word itself can refer both to what is passed on and to the process of passing it on. The challenge of passing on a tradition is perennial. Both ways of living and writings reflect the culture of their own time and so need to be translated into the changing languages of later cultures.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Language and prejudice

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 22 March 2020
    15 Comments

    I have been bemused to read the result of a recent poll taken in Britain. It suggests that 26 per cent of people feel ‘uncomfortable’ when hearing foreign languages spoken. Me, I feel envious, simply wishing that I was more of a linguist.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    AOC speech not racist, just code switching

    • Yen-Rong Wong
    • 12 April 2019
    6 Comments

    US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was accused by some of 'verbal blackface' due to her manner in a speech last week. But she wasn't being racist — she was code switching, defined by linguists as the act of moving back and forth between two or more languages or dialects. It's something I know a lot about from experience.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Stop maiming the gift of Aboriginal languages

    • Celeste Liddle
    • 12 June 2018
    17 Comments

    As I watched the debacle over the ill-advised Meanjin cover last week, I couldn't help but reflect on Aboriginal languages and how, when our words or histories do come to the forefront, they're continually disrespected or treated as a massive threat to the white patriarchal status quo. Meanjin is only the latest example.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The rewards of reviving languages

    • Sheila Ngoc Pham
    • 27 April 2018
    4 Comments

    As someone who has a language background which will in all likelihood not make it past one more generation in my family here in Australia, I've long understood the way language loss can occur as a result of migration, to say nothing of acts like colonisation. These are great forces that are difficult but, as I've found, not impossible to resist.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Bursting Australia's monolingual bubble

    • Ann Deslandes
    • 15 January 2018
    6 Comments

    Over 250 languages were spoken across Australia at the time that English arrived with British colonisation. Since then, English has been a strict marker of the contours of Australianness. Were it reframed as a lingua franca rather than the mandatory language, the linguistic diversity in this nation would have more room to breathe.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    NAIDOC: Languages matter because people matter

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 30 June 2017
    11 Comments

    The theme of the week is 'Our Languages matter'. It lies at the heart of the Uluru statement. It also poses questions about the way in which we conceive our identity as a nation. In Australia we communicate in many languages. English is the language of business and public life, but many other languages, both Indigenous and introduced, are the primary languages of groups of Australians. Language is much more than a means of communication. It is an emblem of our tribe. It shapes how we interact.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Peru's indigenous language revival

    • Antonio Castillo
    • 24 January 2017
    4 Comments

    One indigenous language vanishes every two weeks, and Quechua, once the tongue of Peru's mighty Inca Empire, was one of those heading to extinction. That is, until last December, when the first ever Quechua language television news service went to air on the platforms of TV Peru and National Radio, the public broadcaster. According to one presenter it is a 'space that breaks all the paradigms of discrimination and inequality toward those who are speakers of indigenous languages'.

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  • MEDIA

    The language of popular music doesn't have to be English

    • Susie Garrard
    • 29 September 2016
    2 Comments

    Almost all territories have their own popular artists, writing and performing in their native languages. However, many of these musicians seem unable to break into the wider market. In terms of marketed music, there is no doubt that English speaking artists hold sway. Yet some artists, such as Sydney Aboriginal band Dispossessed, who perform in both English and in language, and Cardiff native Gwenno, whose debut solo album is sung entirely in Welsh and Cornish, are bucking the trend.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Abbott's Team Christian Australia

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 22 August 2014
    128 Comments

    Australia is a Christian country. We wear Christian clothes. We eat Christian food, speak Christian languages. Pardon the scepticism but I don't believe all this 'Christian values' nonsense, and I won't be lectured to about my alleged failure to integrate. 

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