Postmodern Trendoid III wrote on Apr 20
th, 2013 at 4:14pm:
I don't think there is any pragmatic reason to learn another language here. .
I agree. To learn a language you need people to speak it with. Regularly.
Was there a pragmatic reason for Singapore to decree English as its official language following its independance?
None other than trade. In Singapore it’s common for kids to grow up with several languages - merely because people around them speak them. I’ve met ethnic Chinese Singaporeans who speak languages like Urdu and Tamil, solely because they learned from other kids in their streets and apartment blocks.
Language acquisition is a value in multilingual societies. Kids in Singapore could just as easily speak to each other in English, but kids are curious and want to learn how other’s talk.
We don’t encourage this curiousity here. There is an unspoken rule to speak English to fit in.
Actually, this is a rule spoken all the time.
Australia is unique among the British colonies in that its early overseers did not adapt to the local languages. English officials and managers in the colonies were expected to learn the local languages. If you were sent to Africa or India or Egypt, you learnt Swahili or Hindi or Arabic and you spoke to your servants and employees in their language. This was the practice of the British until independance in the 1940s and 50s.
Arthur Phillip learned many Eora words and showed them off when he returned to England. Watkin Tench produced a short Eora dictionary. The British, it seems, have always been curious about other languages, and English has changed accordingly. The pukka set loved their worldly colonial patter, just as the soldiers and sailors came back with theirs.
Something happened, however, after the honeymoon period of early settlement in Australia, and then the successive waves of migration through the gold rush and after WWII. Governments, public servants and teachers (the nanny-state PC brigade) banned curiousity for other languages, and actively stamped them out. Aboriginals on the missions were banned from speaking their languages. Migrants were actively discouraged. Even the deaf were banned in schools from signing in their made-up language we now call, in bureaucratese, Auslan.
It’s not that Australians have not had the chance to learn different languages - it’s that language acquisition has essentially been whitewashed by decree, through successive government policies.
Interestingly, our rate of interracial marriage is now higher than countries like Singapore..Culturally and linguistically, however, we’re still rather plain. It’s a strange contrast noticed by tourists to the East Coast cities all the time. Australia’s a very multiracial society, but culturally, quite tidy and homogenised.
And we’re not like Germany and France, where groups of Turks and Arabs, for instance, live for generations without learning the local lingo. People largely integrate. This is a huge success, and it can be seen to have roots in the early policies and practices of settlers like Phillip.
So it is possible to have a national language, culture and set of dominant values, but be racially and ethnically heterogenous.
This is radically different to most other nations in our region, and a significantly different historical narrative to other British colonies.
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