the Federal authorities approved involved both ESL and bilingual education. ..... of children who speak the language, the speakers in the whole galaxy, would fill.
Lo Bianco, Joseph (1996) Language as an Economic Resource, Language Planning Report No 5.1. Pretoria, South Africa: Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology
LANGUAGE AS AN ECONOMIC RESOURCE JOSEPH LO BIANCO
Introduction: new possibilities for pluralism It is not overly dramatic to assert that we have arrived at an historically decisive moment for
pluralism.
�t may perhaps be difficult for South Africans, in the context of national reconstruction and
the enthusiasm for the development of a pluralistic society that is characteristic of this time, to
be as aware as we are in Australia of the starkness of the choice that we face. South Africans have faced starker choices than almost anyone but in this historical moment you have selected
pluralism over its alternatives. The choice is between galloping, monoe�tric (what we might call monological, and monocultural) ways of being in the world or the pluralist alternative.
Historically the attempts within the nations of Europe and of Asia, within nations all over the
world, to stamp out pluralism and diversity, to say that pluralism is a cost that we cannot
afford and to say that the alternatives which are simpler, at least theoretically or putatively, are
in fact desirable, have always given rise to authoritarianism in politics, to false science which
attempts to find unfindable hierarchies of intelligence, and to false morality which justifies repression on the invented hierarchies of virtue.
Almost always, perhaps always, the consequences of the alternatives of pluralism have been
appalling, appalling in their human cost and appalling in their social and economic cost.
Pluralism is always and everywhere justified by the appalling consequences of the repressive
and authoritarian alternatives.
Language pluralism is a special kind of the human diversity that simplifiers of the world wish
to eradicate.
To defend it will require an effort of organisation and one of will and
understanding. We will need a new way of construing our understanding of languages. The grammar of popular representation of language diversity biases common representation
towards the negative.
We need to rethink language diversity for many reasons. One of these is because the world is
a dramatically different place from when many of the presently dominant perceptions of it were formed over the last 45 years. Most of us know the world of what we might safely call
the Anglo-American ascendancy. The period from 1945 until 1989 was a period in which the primary global decisions were made in few places and made within the dominant modes of
thinking characteristic of those places. Those few places were English-speaking, used modes of understanding the world which were fundamentally derived from the Western rational
instrumental and technical orientation. Inevitably the institutions of the world reflect the
projections of the experiences, values and modes of thought of its main makers.
The year 1989 saw the collapse of any fundamentally contesting political order in Europe and
subsequent years Ril\re seen the ·absorption of all the world into a sort of truce that holds that
liberal market economies are the social-political form to adopt. Perhaps strangely though, this
emergence of a new form of economic order gives strength to cultural diversity and language
differences.
The collapse of the political regimes in Europe that contested the Anglo
American domination, in fact contested its political ideology.
The abandonment of that
cleavage has in fact resulted in a multipolar globalising but interconnected world economic system; the transfer of economic power away from exclusive Anglo-American domination,
English language domination, to many centres in the world which are not English-speaking
and whose economies do not function according to the norms and rules and patterns born in Western Europe and carried to their height in the United States.
Pluralism of some sort is inevitable for all nations, whether it is internal diversity or whether it
is required in their accommodation to others who are different but powerful. All nations will have to accommodate the fact that the bulk of economic power in the world no longer resides
in English-speaking centres but in North Asia and in North Europe. And very importantly,
despite the fact that many of these countries know and use English, the way in which they
have constructed their economic power draws on cultural patterns which make traditional economics, even the traditional ways of understanding the discipline of economics, radically
inadequate. We'll have to think completely differently about the interrelation of economy and
culture to be able to absorb the new learning that the success of these"economies requires us to
do. In the Western tradition we have learned that there is a whole realm of activities that are excluded from the understanding of economy - that is culture, ways of being, family patterns
and language - and we have been able to exclude these from our und,erstandings of the way economies work because economies were modelled on particular ones, i.e. Britain after the
industrial revolution and the United States as the epitome of the success of that model. But
we cannot explain the success of particular economies - Japan, China (or more accurately, the
phenomenon of cross-national family-based Chinese capitalism), Taiwan and South Korea (increasingly now Thailand, Indonesia, and India), states where the Western formula about the
relation between the state, the economy and the domain of culture do not readily apply. :JI'
We cannot explain the economic progress, the specificities of the Asian pathways to growth
and trading success without making reference to something which is usually made invisible and naturalised in discussions of economy.
We exclude from consideration, because we
assume as given, the particular cultural pattern, with its linguistic correlate, the ways in which
families and groups cohere and produce what we might call communality, various forms of
sociality. It would be extreme of course to attribute the economic growth of these and other
countries solely, or even principally, to cultural factors, but there is indeed a cultural pattern
both to their economic success and also to the new economic environment in which we
· increasingly find ourselves.
We cannot otherwise explain why certain societies are
economically very successful in circumstances in which they have no or few raw materials and they have to produce ways of organising their society culturally which give them
economic advantage.
Any view of language as an economic resource will have to take account of new economics and newly powerful economies.
Language policy orientations The American linguist Richard Ruiz has studied the language policies of diverse settings and
identifies in them what he calls an underlying orientation.
He notes that in the public
response to language pluralism there are three underlying orientations (ideologies may actually be a more accurate term). These are: language as problem, language as right and
language as resource. Given the complexity of the interaction of language and society it is
probably the case that each of these is always present in any phase
Language policies typically regard language diversity as a problem. This was the pattern in
Australia until the adoption in 1987 of the National Policy on Languages (and to some extent
this approach has persisted or been revived since). Such approaches display an anxiety for the
consequences of pluralism.
The underlying discourse which frames policies that view
language pluralism as a problem is all about difficulties, issues are understood and framed in
relation to obstacles they present to institutions or more generally to social cohesion: how are
we to get the childrien of non-English speakers to master English?; so many people can't
understand the safety messages that are inscribed industrial manuals or on medicine bottles -
how do we tackle this problem?, how can social services be delivered effectively when so few
people speak English?; how can voting rights be secured?; drivers' licences be granted? The manifestations of the problem approach are multifarious.
When the beginning point is to treat language pluralism as a problem that interrupts or
obstructs the efficient delivery of services, inevitably the understandings of the reality of diversity will be framed by problems and difficulties.
Policy intervention will be
characterised by the goal of eradicating the problem. One of the historical problems with English as a second language teaching in countries like Australia, Britain and the United
States, and I suspect possibly South Africa as well, has been its attempt (consciously or
unconsciously) to replace the mother tongue. ESL is one of the domains for the inculcation of
minorities into a dominant cultural paradigm and its originating frame of reference has often been the eradication, however sublimated in pedagogically appealing rhetoric, of the 'obstacle', the learner's first language.
However, teaching English as a second language inevitably produces bilingualism.
It
involves the inscription of one language on an active mind that already knows another. But
some of the literature and much of the practice of English as a second language has been as though it had no other effect on the language capacities, knowledges and behaviours of the learner. There is a great trend pattern in these policies which is afl about the mono's: the
monocultural, the monological, the monodidactic. Transitionally there is diversity. However,
it is unstable and tends towards the domination of one and the elimination of the other. The
underlying paradigm of the language as problem approach in policies (whether explicitly
enunciated or not) produces an elimination of the source of the problem.
This is a
consequence a discourse which structures not only thinking but the resultant patterns of
action. Until the middle of the 1970s official practice and espoused policy were coloured with
unquestioned assumptions and an inability to conceive of language diversity as anything other
than an obstacle to the achievement of one or other of several important national goals: the
assimilation of minorities, the efficient delivery of health or legal services or economic development.
In reaction to the language as problem orientation in public policies is the language as right
orientation. In Australia this was a strong feature of debates and official texts in the mid 1970s. We had a sort of language upheaval in which the previously dominant language
planning approach was directly contested. Immigrant and Aboriginal Australians were in the
forefront of a campaign to alter public policy on languages. In some ways Australia is a
graveyard of languages. In the last 207 years, more languages have died in Australia than in probably any other country in the world. Australia's multilingualism, much vaunted today,
has a sad past of neglect and repression. In reaction to the historical pattern qf perceiving the
public use and even the private presence of large numbers of languages other than English as
a problem to be eradicated, the new agitation of the 1970s asserted the maintenance and
retention of these languages as a right. Community activism and demands utilised a wide
array of arguments and, to assert this right, arguments that were based on inherent rights, the
overcoming of past oppressions, persuasive rights about new forms of citizenship. These
gradually merged with arguments to do with the improved and more effective education of
children who speak minority languages. These latter arguments were very interesting since
they ultimately ushered in a new discourse altogether, one in which science and research came
to play a role, in which intellectuals joined forces with community advocates and produced the language as resource orientation in policy. In this approach linguistic diversity forms
part of a new image and potential for the country, a sort of national interest ideology
construing languages and bilingualism as a positive contribution to the development of the
country, its external and trade interests, as well as a cultural and intellectual resource to children who speak such languages natively. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s State and
Federal policies came to stress the need for children to intellectualise in their first language as
a more secure basis for the acquisition of English, the benefits to the nation in the maintenance intergenerationally of the language skills of its citizens and the pragmatic
external interest and benefits that could accrue from utilising these skills in trade, diplomacy
and other relations with foreign countries.
But in Australian society the term right is a problematic one. We do not have a Bill of Rights
which formalises and attaches legal sanction to rights.
We have a British common law
tradition and limitelttlass action possibilities and the national culture tends not to think about
rights in formal and legalistic manner typical of the United States. The Australian notion of
rights is more in the realm of persuasive discourse, in other words, in popular participation in
policy making, rights are advocated as part of the persuasive process of generating general
entitlements from the legal-political framework of the society and its institutions rather -than being established in legal settings and being derived from the specifics of the constitution. In
addition language may be a somewhat difficult category to attach formal rights to in legal
settings which stress individualism, since language is collectively produced and owned.
The ethos of the debates of the decade of the 1970s was all about challenging · past constructions of language diversity as a problem and in this sense the language as right
framework was invoked.
Right to Resource: some observations about America The turning point in Australian debates between a primarily language as right advocacy and a
language as resource advocacy may have been the discussioR about whether or not
bilingualism is an advantage or a disadvantage to children. Its completion was the language as an economic resource argument which I discuss below.
Advocates came to adduce evidence from researchers which reversed previous views that two languages disadvantaged children intellectually. The key point seems to be whether or not
children are able to intellectualise in their first language, whether or not they are able to
develop that language to such a level of skill that their bilingualism will become a positive
benefit for them - what has come to be termed a threshold. Below this there may be some lag in the accomplishment of expected or age-appropriate tasks compared to monolinguals.
Above such points the reverse may be true. My aim here is simply to point out that entering
debates of this sort is to depart from advocating . principally on the f(asis of rights and to embark on establishing policies on the basis of the research evidence.
It is also very hard to actually establish rights-based policies in societies like ours, and the
advocacy of rights-based policies also produces resentment from other people. In the United
States, bilingual education was mandated in the 1968 Title 7 Amendments to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1966. These Amendments were largely based on the idea that poor children, principally Hispanic children, had the additional burden of a language
disparity. This became enmeshed in a consideration of their educational under-achievement
and poverty. The primary justification for Federal intervention was the tacking of poverty related disadvantage.
The initial stimulus for bilingual education was therefore an anti
poverty one. In 197 4, in a landmark court case in San Francisco in which some 1,400
Cantonese-speaking children successfully prosecuted a school district, a further legal
milestone was established. The ruling from the court case established that children may be
considered to have been disadvantaged by educational practitioners if the educational systems do not make explicit efforts to assist them in gaining access to the curriculum.
Such
disadvantage is either through their being taught only in English, without adequate ESL or
other remedies (such as bilingual education) being provided. The subsequent remedies which the Federal authorities approved involved both ESL and bilingual education.
Some of the practical consequences of the legal path to the establishment of such 'language
rights' have been regrettable. In some, perhaps many, instances there has been a process of
minimal compliance. Despite there being several outstanding examples of bilingual education
there are too many where minimal compliance with required law has been the outcome. In reaction, since the 1980s, there has emerged a serious and so far very successful move to officialise English and to roll back bilingual education. By 1995 twenty-two states had passed
official English laws and there is a reasonable .chance that the Congress will follow suit in
1996. Many Americans have not been persuaded to the cause of mu! tilingualism and present moves show that, at least at a national policy level, the language as resource ·position is attracting few believers.
Towards language as (an economic) resource The idea that languages are a resource, and especially problematically that minority languages are a resource, must travel a difficult road. A resource orientation will of course involve a
much wider set of justifications for public support of bilingualism than simply economic ones.
Languages are an intellectual and cultural resource in clearer ways than they are an economic
resource. Elites in all societies have not doubted the cultural value of bilingualism. Indeed
such bilingualism has often been the mark of the appropriate education of elites. The contest has always been about extending the principle that bilingualism is valuable to non-elite
domestic populations, compounded by their being speakers of non-prestige languages or of
stigmatised varieties of prestige languages, as well as their socio-economic rank or ethnic and racial marginality.
Zulu-speaking children who start school speaking only Zulu (and are then to learn English or
Afrikaans or some other language) have already done a huge amount of learning. They know
a language, they are lingual, they are proficient speakers and conceptualisers. The usual pattern of the education of such children, in most parts of the world, has been to
misunderstand or to neglect that prior intellectual development and knowledge, the linguistic
conceptualisation that they already possess, and that ought to be secured, both for its own and
the child's sake, but also as a more secure basis for subsequent language acquisition. The
collapse of hierarchical gradations of culture and the more secure scientific basis of planning
for the education of children who speak languages other than the dominant ones of their
societies makes the extension of the privileges of bilingualism for elites possible, desirable and defensible for all.
For our present purposes, however, we may leave these non-economic considerations aside.
We are in an historical moment which potentially gives a lot of power, economic muscle, to
pluralism and to diversity, and to knowledge of pluralism and skills in diverse languages. It is
important to seize the possibilities opened up by the uniqueness of the present occasion.
These derive from the multipolar economic system which is emerging and in which success is not directly connected to a single cultural-linguistic system.
In discussing the language and economics connection I shall draw often on Australian
examples. Australia used to be the sort of country that I've heard a lot of people in South Africa say that you think we still are, i.e. a nation deeply attached to Britain in outlook and
policy. It is indeed the case that prior to the 1960s the Australian language choices were
governed by Britain's geography and traditions.
Three intersecting forces produced the
changes that have transformed the choices and intentions of language policy. These three points take me to the central point of our discussion:
construed as an economic resource.
how multilingualism came to be
Three forces * Community activism.
An electoral constituency for multilingualism was created in the
early 1970s and through to the mid 1980s. There was strong ethnic, indigenous agitation
around the defence and protection of languages, what used to be called Aboriginal languages
or ethnic and migrant languages and came to be renamed community and Australian
languages. In this renaming is reflected the passage from notions of language as problem to
repositioning these languages within the public consideration as integral to society.. A large
part of the purpose and effect was to distinguish these languages from foreign languages,
those taught traditionally in schools and universities, belonging to and used by people far
away, not 'us'. The agitation involved many groups but was as successful as it was mainly
because it was able to mobilise a broad-based coalition of interests able to defer their specific
goals in the interests of a wider change in public attitude and policy. Given the nature of the
Australian electoral process, each side of politics considered that it needed its own version,
for them politically the correct one, of multiculturalism (in which multilingualism is a core feature). In this process, multicultural definitions of Australia were nourished and given
mainstream resonance, though it would be incorrect to imply that these are not still
· controversial and contested today. * Professional legitimation.
In our sort of society it would be very hard for community
activism alone to produce changed political or policy (public policy) consequences. So it. was necessary that this community activism be built into an envelope, if you like, of professional
legitimation. InteHWctuals (and I use this term to mean not only academics but all those whose
work is the generation of new knowledge, those forces in society whose participation in
debates helps name, shape and frame public culture) participated in the process of reformulating Australian national identity. This was done initially for a socially more- just
claim for indigenous peoples, later for more inclusive, or culturally diverse understandings of
Australian national identity and subsequently to secure a place for the Asia-Pacific region in
national thinking. The latter is very important and is discussed below.
* Economic pragmatism. The economic connection for languages and cultural knowledge
occurred at many levels. There was at least an internal economic connection and an external
economic connection. The former derived from an understanding of needs for economic restructuring at both the micro- and the macro-level.
Increasingly, Australians were told that the most successful economies were those that
invested heavily in research to build high value added content to their products, that the
national economy had depended for too long on abundant extractable raw commodities and
primary produce. These were the traditional mainstays of the economy but now, because of
increased competition from new suppliers and the erosion of traditional markets (especially
after Britain's accession to the European common market in the mid 197Ds), prices for these
exports were declining.
Purchasers were in any case more and more able to manipulate supply prices, to add value
through elaborate transformations of the primary produce or commodity (expensive Italian knitwear from inexpensive wool, expensive Japanese electronics from various commodities),
and the margins on the added value greatly exceeded the margins gained on the input
materials. It was also clear that these elaborately transformed manufactures were buoyant in demand, required investment in educational and other infrastructure in the society that
produced them, and were accompanied by services industries of many kinds which were also
highly remunerative.
The external economic change was the massive transfer away from tffe Anglo-American domination of the world of the post-1945 era. This resulted in the trading power of the immediate postwar world in which Australia's economy had been shaped to require major
reorientation. Combined with this was the progressively globalising world trading system and
the emergence of tourism and the commodification of education, two new industries in which
Australia could find a niche. All these forces, tied to our geographic proximity to Asian
countries, booming economically, added weight to domestic multicultural and professional
calls for more action for language policy.
In the early 1980s what I would call a unified constituency for a pluralistic language policy
had emerged.
A unified constituency - for a short while Confronted with insistent calls for plµralistic language planning, governments did as
governments do, tried to split the constituency into small and manageable (in their view)
priority (in their view) considerations. To concede to some calls for action and not others. To
concur with the need for upgrading commercially significant language teaching but not move,
or move only tokenistically, on behalf of Australian languages, or community languages, or
sign language.
We encountered the central dilemma:
what is the connection between
economy and pluralism or diversity? The popular conception, one which language planners
have assessed and never satisfactorily resolved, is whether diversity and multilingualism are
correlates of disadvantage and even poverty for countries.
This however is a different
question from that which faces Australia since our language pluralism is based on the universal recognition of English as the national and common language.
Governments justify the need to intervene economically because it is here that their mandate �f
,
and the interest of the majority of citizens can be seen to lie. But this was a time when narrow
understandings of economy were inadequate since the public perception was that Australia
needed a widespread cultural change to make the most of its external economic opportunities and to effect the needed internal economic changes. These were seen to be cultural as well as
economic. The constituency held together and argued that no language policy was acceptable in our country unless it was a comprehensive policy that addressed all areas of interest and all
language groups and their rights and needs. The task was to make the connection between the
languages and cultures of our community and those of the powerful trading partners and regional neighbours.
Policies, even unspoken ones It is important not to assume that only explicit policies are policies. All societies everywhere
and always have language policies. Language so permeates social life that even failing to
address it openly and clearly is in itself a position, one which says that the powerful social and economic forces will be allowed to prevail. Openly declaring policy has the advantage of
permitting review, evaluation and wide participation in the formulation and revision of policy.
Implied policies can only be identified by examining the language effects of the areas affected
by policy and therefore influenced by them. Australia's policies had previously been able to
be induced from the practices of the Australian Broadcasting Commission and the
broadcasting licensing rules, practices of schools, hospitals and the legal system in relation to linguistic minorities and also the biases and tendencies of our economic activity. We were
keen to trade only with people who were, 'like us', people with whom there would be no
language mismatch, little cultural negotiation required and sought, in goods and services which reflected a particular relationship of dependency.
Australia's implicit language policy At its starkest, Australia's implicit and historical language policy had been for English
monolingualism based on southern British norms, despite being one of the most multilingual
societies in the world in the most multilingual part of the world. In PapwviNew Guinea alone
there are 864 languages; in the Solomon Islands there are 76; in Vanuatu there are 112 spoken by 110,000 people, plus English, plus French, plus Bislama, an English-based Creole;
the highest language density of any country in the world. Prior to British colonisation in
Australia there were 250 indigenous languages - clearly distinct languages representing a
dialect range of some 600. The linguistic demography was even further added to through
immigration which contributed, though much later, some 100 additional languages. As with
other nations-become-states, Australia desired a standard national language as its official form
of communication not only for reasons of administrative efficiency but to connect it to the
cultural and even spiritual traditions to which it aspired. The policy, the implicit policy, had a clear goal, the English was modelled on a southern British base and it was aspired to be the only language of Australians, the only lingual way of being an Australian.
The strategy for its achievement, given that demographically it was far from being the actual situation of the population, was dependent on three principles. First, a popular regard of
language pluralism as a threat to national unity, to cohesion, an erosion of the Britishness of
the society, in short a problem to be eradicated. Second, a series of measures to eradicate that
problem such as a laissez-faire assimilationism in schooling, neglect of foreign languages in
schooling, stigmatising minority languages, repressing indigenous languages, and the general
effect of the unitary direction of the forces of economy that favoured intergenerational
linguistic shift to English.
The constituency's advocates The unified language constituency comprised groups whose interests are often divergent,
whose interests have again diverged to some extent, but who came together for a useful and
effective alliance for a brief time. There were people whose interests were in Aboriginal
languages, who would argue in that debate that their languages, being the languages of
Australia - Australian languages - ought to be given priority consideration. Their languages
were on the verge of extinction, many still are, many have become extinct.
Then there was an urban immigrant labour force, groups who argued on the basis of
disadvantage but at�i supported by articulate second-generation professionals who had entered servicing fields in education, law and health. Although the linguistic case is clearly
not as urgent, for example, if Spanish-speaking Chilean children stop speaking Spanish and move over to English, the language doesn't become extinct in the world. But if Walbiri
people stop using Walbiri then the language disappears from the face of the earth. However,
the social and educational and other rationales were similar. Yet the population size and
electoral strength, perceived more than real in many cases, of the immigrant advocates was far
stronger than for the Aboriginal groups.
In the early 1970s there were few if any services to accommodate the new-found
multilingualism of the population. Tragic workplace accidents in which immigrant workers were injured or killed, research evidence that immigrants suffered higher rates of mental illness and disadvantage at school, all sustained a public discourse about disadvantage and led
to the creation of language services that progressively came to serve all minorities, e.g. the
Telephone Interpreter Service of 1973.
problem such as a laissez-faire assimilationism in schooling, neglect of foreign languages in schooling, stigmatising minority languages, repressing indigenous languages, and the general
effect of the unitary direction of the forces of economy that favoured intergenerational
linguistic shift to English.
The constituency's advocates The unified language constituency comprised groups whose interests are often divergent,
whose interests have again diverged to some extent, but who came together for a useful and
effective alliance for a brief time. There were people whose interests were in Aboriginal
languages, who would argue in that debate that their languages, being the languages of
Australia - Australian languages - ought to be given priority consideration. Their languages
were on the verge of extinction, many still are, many have become extinct.
Then there was an urban immigrant labour force, groups who argued on the basis of
disadvantage but at�� supported by articulate second-generation professionals who had entered servicing fields in education, law and health. Although the linguistic case is clearly
not as urgent, for example, if Spanish-speaking Chilean children stop speaking Spanish and
move over to English, the language doesn't become extinct in the world. But if Walbiri
people stop using Walbiri then the language disappears from the face of the earth. However,
the social and educational and other rationales were similar. Yet the population size and
electoral strength, perceived more than real in many cases, of the immigrant advocates was far
stronger than for the Aboriginal groups.
In the early 1970s there were few if any services to accommodate the new-found
multilingualism of the population. Tragic workplace accidents in which immigrant workers were injured or killed, research evidence that immigrants suffered higher rates of mental illness and disadvantage at school, all sustained a public discourse about disadvantage and led
to the creation of language services that progressively came to serve all minorities, e.g. the
Telephone Interpreter Service of 1973.
And I have to say - and I'm rather proud of this - in all the literature it's recognised as the first
pluralistic language policy in any English-speaking country, and English-speaking countries
have a real problem with multilingualism, more so than other countries, for reasons that I'm
sure you will be aware of, but I'd be happy tp talk about them.
The policies The result of the pressures I have mentioned was the adoption of our first ever explicit language policy in July 1987, The National Policy on Languages.
The NPL has been
recognised internationally as the first attempt by an English-speaking nation to explicitly set out a pluralistic language plan. Since that time the NPL was revised and a new policy, The
Australian Language and Literacy Policy, was issued in September of 1991. Also, in January
of 1994, an Asia-specific language education plan, Asian Languages and Australia's
Economic Future was promulgated by the forum that brings together the State and Federal
sJY
governments, the Council of Australian Governments. In the broader field of multicultural
and Aboriginal policy there have been the National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia
1988, the national process of Aboriginal Reconciliation and related and supportive policies.
These policy statements are not among themselves all consistent; not simple adaptations to changing times.
They reflect internal tensions and changed priorities and underlying
ideologies about the relation of language and society and are in some ways in contest and
incommensurate one with another.
Broad principles of language planning in Australia The principles which frame the development of the above policies are the following. I use the four E's designation of the National Policy on Languages and although later policies did not continue this designation they each reflect one or other of these social goals.
* Enrichment In an attempt to ensure that its focus was inclusive of the whole society the National Policy on Languages addressed the primary, traditional intellectual and mainstream cultural purpose for
languages education under the title of enrichment.
Essentially this refers to the traditional belief that languages study is a cultural enrichment of
the individual, opening up new worlds of perception and knowledge, that break from the trap
of imagining the reality is rooted in one's mother tongue and immutably consistent with it.
The intellectual contrast that bilingualism can, potentially provide, is identical in its effect to
the liberal humanist goal of all education. So this universal and sustaining principle remains important in all policy development for languages.
* Equality The second sustaining rationale for comprehensive language planning in Australia has been a set of ideas to do with the educational and social opportunities of its citizens. There are many and varied ways ).)}!Which language education intersects with disadvantage, and not only for
those who speak languages other than the common and powerful language of the wider
society. I refer to the communication disabled, to the hearing or visually impaired as well as to
children and adults who speak languages other than English and to those who although they may be speakers of English are not at all or not sufficiently literate (or numerate) in English.
The arguments about the opportunities of these people to more or less equally access society's benefits are one dimension. The overcoming of social and economic costs are another. But
what sort of costs are we talking about here? The economic cost of producing documents in four or five languages, or fifteen or thirty, against the human cost of industrial accidents,
death, injury and, ultimately, the economic costs of litigation that follow. In some cases it is
possible to demonstrate that the direct costs of multilingual communication compared to the
direct costs of monolingual communication in particular workplaces and other settings reveal
that in fact monolingualism is more expensive than utilising more effective multilingual
communication.
* External The third principle essentially refers to Australia's long, problematic and indispensable relationship with Asia. In South Africa's case I guess it would concern Southern Africa, or the whole of Africa, but Southern Africa in the wider world, in Australia's case Asia and the wider world.
Asia, or relations with Asian nations, has formed a major part of the Australian historical pattern. National identity was shaped in some part by the proximity, and denial of that proximity to Asia, and its more recent enthusiastic embracing.
After national Federation in 1901 the former British colonies passed legislative and other barriers to Asian immigration in the form of White Australia Policy. Other measures were similarly cultural in their long term effect: The denial of the vote to women, the exclusion of Aboriginal people from the census. Even though federation was an important moment of political democracy it was a time of retrograde steps for the subsequent:eicclusionary pattern of the nation's development, its cultural growth, and for the rights and
justice for large
sections of the community. Australia had had a proud political history of democratisation until then. In the 1880s in South Australia was the first political jurisdiction in the entire world to grant women the vote. Twenty years before federation women had equal voting rights and were represented in Parliament, Aboriginal Australians had more rights m some colonial administrations prior to federation than after, and the exclusion of Chinese labour via the setting up immigration restrictions reversed previously more open arrangements that had brought many Chinese to the gold fields in the middle part of the 19th century.
Connecting with Asia has a long, rich and problematic history in our country. Over subsequent decades the closure was progressively loosened until it was totally abandoned in the late 1960s and then the opposite tendency was inaugurated. The external rationale focuses on what has since come to be termed Asia literacy, the shorthand term for the imperative of Australian educational systems to prepare Australia's young people, but the wider population as well for accommodating to the region.
* Economics. As discussed earlier there are internal changes, those mentioned earlier and also the servicing
of the domestic multilingual community (commercial banks expanding their client base by
appealing to the community in all its specificity, e.g. understanding the Muslim view on
interest), cultural patterns and family priorities and ways of saving etc.) and of course the
external economic changes referred to earlier.
Essentially human resource development is primary field of interest to the relation between
languages and the economy. As the economy itself moves away from raw materials and
primary produce away from a 'dig it up, grow it, put it on a big ship and take it to Korea' sort
of economy, to one which stresses the elaborate transformation of these raw materials into high value added ones, and also through services, tourism and education.
The human interactions involved in taking primary produce or commodities to South Korea in
large ships woyld be very few. You would have one government agent talking to another .�,,
government agent or corporate sector representatives talking to another, negotiating contracts
in English. The ultimate consumer was an anonymous figure to the seller. In service or s·mall industry based economies consumers, the actual or potential consumers, are vitally important. Among the wealthiest countries in the world are many that are resource-poor.
These
economies depend on a different sort of base, one that involves high information content in all their products, research, development, manipulation of knowledge, financial transactions.
This is the tertiary level of the economy. The classically poor country is the one that has raw
materials or primary produce alone, has never developed its people, and depends on a single market destination for its goods.
Calling the shots The US every year runs a trade deficit with Japan of 65 billion US dollars. 65 billion US
dollars is transferred from the United States to Japan every single year. Japan has a trade
surplus of some $145b per annum, but Germany is actually a larger exporter than Japan (though with a slightly smaller surplus. An extraordinary transfer of economic power' has
taken place. Taiwan has the third largest economic reserves of any country in the world.
There are some 8 Asian nations with growth rates in double digits. The indicators of economic
vitality in that part of the world are many, so many that it is fashionable to speak of the next
century as the Asian century.
With non-English-speaking nations calling the shots economically and the changes in the
domestic economy it is clear that such a combination of factors can powerfully support the case for a language as resource based policy. Cultural questions become more important
because the basis of the economic success of such nations is different from the shared Western
understandings that prevailed. In their road to economic success the Japanese have followed a
distinctive path in which Confucian values, traditional forms of sociality, conformity and
cooperation and other non-economic resources of the nation have been drawn upon as the underlying national organisational form. Such considerations are true qfl'all economies, of
course, since these are not autonomous systems divorced from the cultural envelope of the
people who create them.
Other considerations for an economic rationale for languages emerge from the galloping pace
of globalisation which is rapidly interlinking all economies.
The prelude to economic
integration has been the capacity for global communication and information exchange. This permits producers and consumers to know rapidly and to their commercial advantage the necessary facts about production, supply, transport and exchange of merchandise and services.
All of this gives some prominence to language and to cultural patterns.
In the midst of a rapidly globalising economy, one which may produce a seamless net of
economy in which the nation state is of lessened significance in the conduct of economic
policy, there is the role of niche markets. In a seamless or linked economy competitive advantage accrues to those able to locate, or create, niches, i.e. those segments of the economy
which give a distinctive advantage and in which it is possible to command clear competitive
advantage, either because of privileged information, skill, capacity, cost regimes or some
other factor. Cultural production, or, more simply, the competitive utilisation of cultural knowledge, assists in niche marketing and niche production.
South Africa may, like
Australia, have a special potential in certain markets because of its ability to combine
population
resources,
extraordinarily
infrastructure and mineral wealth.
attractive
tourism offerings,
generally
good
Policy goa]s From the four social goals Australian language policies evolved four broad objectives:
universal acquisition of English, support for indigenous languages, widespread second
language learning and community language maintenance and widespread and equitable
language services.
* English The policies have always described Australian English as the common, convenient or national language, no/i�e official language.
In no document of recent times has the designation
'official' appeared. To officialise is in fact to establish a relationship of power. English is the
language of convenience and power in Australia. It is also the language of national culture.
Australian English has evolved its distinctive forms so that it is a recognisably particular form
of that large, polycentric family of varieties coming increasingly to be called World Englishes.
Australian policy has taken a pragmatic road towards making its population
proficient and literate in English. In 1947 on board the usually overcrowded immigrant ships
taking Europe's displaced to the new world there commenced the shipboard classes. From these rudimentary beginnings emerged a large, highly professional national Adult Migrant
Education Program. From the late 1960s and early 1970s these programs were extended to
school children in th� Child Migrant Education Programs and their equivalents for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.
More recently the emergence of a greater awareness that many of those who have difficulties with written English are native born English speakers has led to the extension of adult literacy
and basic education programmes. More recently still, because of the commodification of education, the vast international demand for English proficiency and also demand for English medium education, because English provides connection with the almost 1.6 billion people in
.
the world who speak it or are learning it, Australian public and private institutions have spawned a large number of commercial colleges which earn many millions of dollars in foreign revenue for the country through the marketing and export of education or of English language courses, either on their own or linked courses with all manner of other offerings, tourism, holidays, medicine, golf, etc.
This industry now is almost equal in size to some of the traditional mainstays of the economy.
It used to be the case that Australian forms of English were deprecated. The standard practice for public broadcasters was to adopt what was perceived to be a cultivated, British sounding accent.
However, this has progressively eroded to the point where Australian norms of
correctness are the only ones that are typically encountered in the medf( in education and in virtually all other domains of life.
I am sure that South Africa could do the same (if it has not already done so). To reinforce and strengthen public education for your people it would be possible to generate the special sort of relationship between the private sector and government and the universities which- the Reconstruction and Development Programme already envisages.
Finally, under language policy provisions for English are some activities in which English (or rather standard English) is a second dialect.
Aboriginal people speak many varieties of
English and teachers, researchers and others who communicate regularly with indigenous speakers of non-standard varieties seek to impart respect and understanding of the systematicity of these varieties, to contest the stigma these varieties sometimes attract.
* Languages other than English: Foreign and Community The commonly encountered acronym is LOTE (languages other than English) which
encompasses both community languages, preferred to foreign since they are languages like
Italian, Vietnamese, Khmer, Indonesian, Greek, Spanish, German, Chinese, which are spoken
actively and maintained within the community.
community languages.
There are some 130 non-indigenous
LOTE also embraces foreign languages;
the preferred number
ranging from 9 in the National Policy on Languages, 14 in the Australian Language and
Literacy Policy and 4 in the Asian Languages and Australia's Economic Future report. The struggle in policy has been to balance the competing demands of foreign languages for
perceived national economic benefit with the language maintenance efforts of community
groups.
Not in all cases is there a conflict since many community languages are also
languages of external economic significance. Since the early part of this century there had
hardly been any serious primary school second language education. Now there is virtually no
primary school in the country that does not have at least one and possibly two or three foreign
languages, comnfunity languages, and a solid and growing number of bilingual and immersion programs as well.
A study, just completed, of the languages in South Australia has found that in the final year of
schooling some 47 languages are assessed.
Many of these are taught at after-hours
community-based schools which receive substantial public funding and material support.
There are many schools that have five or six languages and different ways of providing their
language teaching, either within the school or by the school acknowledging the study the
children undertake of the language in some after-hours learning format and giving them
assessment and support for it, or by satellite, correspondence or some other means. There are many and very practical ways of responding to multilingualism, to the demands of multilingualism, which have nothing to do with the traditional forms of provision through
public bureaucracies and mainstream schooling.
* Australian languages The third part of our policy refers to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island languages. The
Torres Strait is the area between Australia and Papua New Guinea with some 24 indigenous languages, mostly of Papuan origin. Aboriginal languages have been reduced in number from
approximately 250 in 1788 to some 120 today. Of the 120, a large number are not spoken by
children and this failed intergenerational transmission will result in the extinction of these
languages. Some languages are strong, preserving contexts and domains of use that are vibrant and still spoken by children. There are some communities where the numbers of
speakers of a particular language can be counted on the fingers of one hand, where the
numbers of children who speak the language, the speakers in the whole galaxy, would fill
only one or two classrooms. The largest indigenous language community speakers is the
range of mutually intelligible varieties known as the Western Desert language group,
numbering some 4,000 speakers. Traditionally, Australian languages were spoken by small numbers of people in stable form for vast periods of time. Size is not nec,essarily an indicator
of strength or fragility of languages but rather whether they are transmitted to children and
whether they have a naturally sustained ecology in the lives of the community that permits
them exclusive discourse domains and in which traditional life is still vibrant.
A network of language centres conduct research work into the languages, orthographic
development and reform, literature production via desktop publishing and other means,
satellite teaching of individual languages over great expanses of desert land to remote
communities, teacher training and professional development, language retrieval, maintenance
and restoration studies of some of these languages. Some of the work does not aim to teach, revive or otherwise rehabilitate particular languages but to record them.
Many of these funding programmes are under the contL! of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.
* Equitable and Widespread Language Services Although language services often means interpreting and translating provisions I prefer to use
the term to mean the use of languages other than English in the media, research support (such
as in the National Languages and Literacy of Australia) and libraries, trying to make sure that
public libraries would have material in languages other than English, in Braille, in non-print
form, in large print and in all other ways that accommodate the diversity of the population's needs.
Question: Does Australia not have an official language? Answer: Not in the de Jure sense in which there is a legislated official language. English is
of course the official language, in the de facto sense of serving the official functions of the country. There is no equivalent of the American attempt to officialise English in that country,
that is to actively pursue a legal demonstration of what people already acknowledge ps reality.
I believe that Jlil' that example there is a symbolic as well as a practical purpose to the
legislation.
Question: More about interpreter and translator services. These services were founded to support the community service obligations of public
institutions, especially in the health and legal domains. They are now likely to assist in the
activities of interpreting and translating of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games and more and
more commonly in servicing tourism and other commercial endeavours.
Health services and legal services in the major states have internal translation and interpreting
services, in New South Wales and in Victoria and South Australia particularly. These are
usually run by what are called the ethnic affairs commissions. They deal with community
languages, Aboriginal languages and also sign language.
Then in education there are
translation and interpreting services that help the parents, and children often, but mostly
parents.
Then in the federal government there is also a translation service in several departments, the Department of Social Security which is concerned with welfare and a couple of other departments as well, and it's compulsory that they translate a lot of information, not Jaws or other legal documents. Those tend not to be translated.
Then there is the Translation and Telephone Interpreter Service. This was set up in 1974. In the United States the telephone company AT&T set up a similar service called Language Line in 1992 I think. In Ireland the Industrial Development Authority and Telecom Eirann have founded a similar multilingual call routing service for European 1 800 calls which is attracting significant business to Ireland via its specialised telephone-based multilingual services.
The TIS was founded in response to the concerns of many professionals about their inability to communicate with the wider public. It is a national service, based in a few cities, but it operates telephonically right across the country - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week - and also makes use of on-site interpreters.
In 1994/95 the service from the Federal Government cost A$18 639 000. This is a substantial investment from the country, representing about one dollar for each person in the country. The service operates through contract translators or interpreters, some 2 500. Every one of them is accredited via the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters. They cover more than one hundred languages, including some Aboriginal languages and Australian Sign Language. Question: Are the services fully paid for by government?
Some of the services have become commercialised recently, meaning that they are available to tourists, or those servicing tourists, and to individuals and companies wishing to explore commercial opportunities within Australia or abroad. This is a change from the past when the TIS was regarded as a right for communities, or what we call community service obligation. The mode of operation is via three-way phone calls.
If someone's involved in a crisis
somewhere and they contact the standard number (the same number across the country), a
sophisticated telephonic system comes into operation that allows the connection in a very short time to a same-language interpreter. There has recently been an upgrade of the system according to which the calls are received and 'parked'. This allows. them to connect through immediately to an interpreter. There is of course no need for the interpreter to be located in the same city as the caller. This could be extended internationally as the Irish scheme demonstrates. Interestingly, one of the TIS languages is Afrikaans. There is also a document translation service but this is not the main service. Their main service is oral interpreting. It's a very large service. In 1994/95 there were 309 thousand telephone interpreting tasks undertaken. These ranged from quite simple matters to very elaborate ones. One famous case that the TIS people comment on is of the baby that was delivered right across the country, with the interpreter located in Brisbane and the mother far away in central Western Australia a very long way away (I think they should have named the child TIS!). It was a successful delivery that lasted nearly 20 hours. The tasks of TIS range from the very simple to the very complex. There were also 9 500 on-site jobs undertaken in the same year. I want to stress that these services are completely in addition to the established interpreter and translator services that the various states have in operation. The TIS is attached to the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs of the federal government. There is a large central health services interpreting service in Melbourne, a large interpreter services bureau attached to the Ethnic Affairs Commission on New South Wales and many other specialised and general services. In the same year that I have been referring to, TIS translated some 9.7 million words. Many government activities in Australia seek to recover operating costs. In the year just completed, TIS anticipates recovering $6.5 million. So a third of the overall operating costs of the service is completely recovered through the provision of commercial services. All government services are required to have what are either called social justice principles, or community service obligations, meaning that certain groups are exempted from having to pay for the service.
The social justice principles mean that individuals such as medical
practitioners, welfare bodies, unions and local governments are not charged for utilisation of
the service whereas other users are.
In 1977 the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters was established with the aim of professionalising standards for interpreting and translating across the country.
They offer several forms of entry to the profession, mainly direct testing of applicants or the accreditation of courses. Candidates who speak rare or uncommon languages and for whom
courses can't readily be set up are offered accreditation via some arrangement that
acknowledges the circumstances.
This might include commissioning overseas experts to
write the test which will incorporate proficiency in the language, and a knowledge of the professional dimensions and practices, ethics and conventions of the profession.
The increasingly more common access route to the profession is via accredited courses. Special devices such as dual handsets are sometimes used in the TIS Qp�ration though these
are not strictly necessary a simple loudspeaker device is also commonly used.
Video
conferencing is becoming more popular as well. Simple training is often useful to assist the
participants to make the most of the service. Many commercial innovations are becoming
widespread that will allow the ever more realistic and multi-modal communication systems
that are needed to be inexpensively put in place. Multilingual support, via Internet and its voiced applications are becoming yearly more feasible and cost effective.
Desktop video conferencing is already available and will permits day permit the integration
of video, audio, text, graphics and fax directly on a single machine.
It had been always believed that technology would accelerate the linguistic assimilation of the world into a few dominant languages. This is open to challenge now as distances are rendered less relevant in the connection of people in effective and very small language communication
systems. These forms of narrow casting of technology hold out much promise for the rich multiplication of cultural and linguistic diversity. Speech management databases will make
multilingual communication affordable, possible, efficient and effective. Many such schemes
will be in use af the 2000 Olympic Games.
Question: Research into Interpreting and Translating. Yes, there's a research service in the universities addresses such issues. The NLLIA supports
a Centre for Research and Development in Interpreting and Translatiµg at Deakin University
in Melbourne. There is also in Brisbane a Key Centre for Asian Languages which conducts
research. It offers higher education programs in interpreting and translating.
Question: Are there broadcasting services in other languages, including sign languages? Yes, there are. There is the Australian Broadcasting Commission which is English only but
captions programmes for deaf people; and the Special Broadcasting Service which is
multilingual and broadcasts on radio and on television in a very large number of languages.
Then there is CA�MA/Imparja, the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association which
broadcasts in several Aboriginal languages in the central Australian area, and then a large number of private but publicly subsidised radio stations in Aboriginal languages and in community languages, and then in Sydney and Melbourne there are Chinese, Italian, Greek,
Arabic, cable lines. Cable will actually make it possible to have a very large number of language-specific channels.
Question: Are there commercial and privately funded printed and electronic media? Yes. There are both sorts. There are certainly viable commercial ones, there are the Chinese
language newspapers in Sydney which are dailies carrying advertising and these are
commercially viable papers. There are about 6 bi-weekly and weekly Italian language papers as well. The so-called 'ethnic press' is vibrant though of course there is rapid turnover and
change just as there is in the mainstream English language media. Chinese, Italian, Arabic,
and Greek television stations, the cable ones, are all commercially operated and survive on
subscriptions and advertising.
Question: Do the social services, like health, receive government support? Yes. These are funded either by states or by the Federal governl'l)ent or by both. The social
justice component of all their services must include provision for what are called access and
equity principles, which includes translating services.
There are also commercial interpreting translating companies which offer their services in the open market.
Question: Aren't a lot of the language issues just symbolic? I think symbolism is important. Symbolism accompanies all practical action. People often
struggle more tenaciously to negotiate symbolic representation or to prevail symbolically over t rivals than they struggle over the pragmatic domain. Symbolic issues ar like a representation
of material questions. They are not divorced from them. People actually contest symbols
very vigorously. But in public policy I have always preferred to be pragmatic and focus on
achievable objectives, although these ought to be inspired by moral and symbolic aims of the highest kind. So although the symbolic questions are important, questions of justice, equality,
opportunity, economic efficiency are all principles which clearly must be incorporated into
policies to make them achieve demonstrable ends.
All of those goals have a strong language component to them. The Reconstruction and
Development Programme is unachievable without some attention to language and general
communication issues. There is a connection, even a causal relationship, between the prospects of progress in people's material lives and the deeper questions of language,
communication, culture and sociality within which our lives are necessarily lived.
On a
practical note, establishing quality interpreting and translating in the nine languages that are
being added to English and Afrikaans would seem to me to be an essential accompaniment to
the more material objectives of the RDP. As an adjunct to the Programme a developmental
affirmative programme for the language and cultural objectives is urgently required.
The technologies to make the print runs of small circulation volumes commercially viable after establishment costs are deducted, are becoming feasible and available. Question: Don't some languages get more support than others?
Oh, that's definitely the case. There are problems of inequity and there are some groups whose languages are on the verge of extinction. But the defeatist attitude is often an entree for injustice.
Multiculturalism does not offer insuperable problems, just remarkable
challenges, and unavoidable ones. Pragmatic solutions to these problems only emerge with far-sighted policy, research, and genuine dialogue with those affected by the issues at hand. There are differences of opinion, some favour resourcing on a geographic basis, others prefer favouring the strongest languages, given their greater likelihood of intergenerational survival, others say "No, you must give the money to the weakest languages, because they're the ones that are on the verge of extinction". Still others argue that it is unwise to become involved in the reconstructiQJl{t>f already extinct languages and that all resources, which are always scarce compared to the need, should be targeted towards those still spoken by children.
As far as community-foreign languages are concerned there are some Europeanists who argue that the stress on Asian languages is misplaced, some Asianists who favour the teaching of European languages to all as a prelude to the later specialisation in Asian languages, some who hold that European languages ought to be phased out altogether, others who hold that we should always prefer the languages that children identify with regardless of whether these are Asian, European or of some other designation.
There are many and disparate realities
encompassed by policies that necessarily deal with generalities and aim to allocate resources to local levels where the more appropriate decisions can be made. Question: Are some indigenous languages learnt by people in other communities?
To a limited extent this is so. There is an interesting national project that aims to produce an indigenous languages framework for their incorporation into mainstream curricula.
Question: Language as an economic resource
.
The term which is now coming to replace previous ones in multicultural policy to describe a
sort of resource construal of diversity is 'productive diversity'
It is of course a slogan.
However, it does suggest that the deeper change of starting to see pluralism as an asset, a
positive benefit, is now being granted its own label. Naming is an important part of the
process of gaining a toe-hold in the imagination of ordinary people. Harnessing economic
forces to get behind language diversity changes the climate of discussion. This is not to diminish issues of social justice. It's to actually give them more support.
The economic prescription contained in the RDP could have been written in Australia (albeit with some changes). It is a very similar economic prescription.
The creation of the Pan South African Language Board and the constituti(i)'rl'al enshrinement of
multilingualism are a necessary but different process from the planning and policy which will
also need to be undertaken. The Reconstruction and Development Programme ought to have
been interspersed, in a transversal way, with the languages and literacy issues that impinge on
the prospects for the realisation of its goals. Then these references to language and literacy
issues would also have to be removed and addressed in their own right. Such a process would
constitute a necessary adjunct to the formal constitutional provisions and legislative changes. Question:
Some instances of practical benefits of multiculturalism, language as an
economic resource. 1)
For a very long time Australia has been a great exporter of wool. Among the biggest
purchasers of the wool are China and Italy. Italy for making super-fine wool products and suits which they in turn export at enormously increased prices, and China for making more mainstream clothing for its vast internal market.
These are about the two largest language communities in our country - after the English speakers of course. Italian (but also Chinese) purchasers of these products have in the past
offered awards for students who have studied these languages. Tracking the use of these languages in the negotiation between purchasers of fine wool and the sale yards in Australia,
and then going back to those companies and indicating all the problems, by studying the
communication patterns that went on between sellers and buyers in English, and then comparing them with those situations where they were done in the native languages, produces concrete examples of why certain problems occurred and how they could very easily have been fixed up. 2)
The Sydney Olympic bid. One of the reasons Sydney won the Olympics for the year
2000 was because the organising committee mobilised the multilingual and multicultural
forces of Sydney to host the delegates from the IOC; to talk to them in their own language, to
demonstrate where the mosques in Sydney are, how the communities that reside there can and will function as cultural hosts and linguistic mediators. 3)
The convention industry. Conventions are big business. To seriously compete for the
large conventions it is critically necessary to be able to provide high-level interpreting and translating and associated cultural support. Some large professional conventions attract more
than 9 000 delegates. If their families accompany them and they stay in hotels, choose to stay
for a three-week holiday subsequently, and purchase souvenirs and artefacts you will
appreciate that the concrete economics of such decisions are substantial and see how the
services initially organised to service immigration now can offer wide-ranging economic
benefit.
Winning a bid for a convention is greatly enhanced if the services offered include culturally
and linguistically appropriate backup. The official interpreting services are usually in four
languages, but the backup language services are in a very large number of languages. Part of
the way to attract conventions is through distinctive offerings, tourism opportunities - go and
visit the Kruger National Park when you come to this conference sort of thing.
4)
The servicing of tourism. Tourism is arguably the biggest single industry in the world.
It's the biggest employer in the world, it's the fastest growing industry in our country. In
order of importance in the Australian economy, tourism is becoming extremely important. So too is insurance and related services. To properly compete in these. new industries in which consumers are sovereign it is necessary to know them. This is as true for insurance as it is for
tourism, as indeed it is for any human servicing industry in which the mores, values and
sociology of the consumer society is critically important to the marketing of products, to their design.
Imagine the knowledge about the concerns of people that is needed to devise
insurance packages for people, the cultural knowledge and the linguistic skills to gain that knowledge in the first instance.
Tourists seek out distinctive national experiences. Japanese folk do not want to travel long
distances only to end up in places that may look like downtown Yokohama. They want
distinctive experiences, and one of them is contact with traditional Aboriginal life and
traditional aboriginal culture and encounters with the language, encouAters with distinctive
cultural ways of being. I cannot imagine how in South Africa it wouldn't be possible for the African languages to be able to be utilised very productively in tourist promotion activity and in offering genuine experiences of cultural encounter.
Interpersonal links are crucially important to success. When people travel and have bad experiences, they may sometimes tend to generalise these to the country or its people.
Tourism is a highly experience-sensitive activity. In the new industries where the modern
wealth of the world is being created, human relationships and therefore culture and language
are often centrally important.
Aboriginal tourism management in the great parks of Australia, such as Kakadu in the
Northern Territory of Australia, who take small groups of tourists, Swedes and Germans in
particular, who are seeking adventure tourism, to cave paintings, the rock paintings, to experience traditional ceremonies.
5)
The location of the regional head quarters of European and other transnational
corporations.
Several European companies intending to establish Asian operations have
located their regional headquarters in Australia and this means transferring numbers of people who work there, setting up a local infrastructure. Language and cultural issues are involved in these decisions to some extent. Italian and French companies can find Australian staff who speak their national languages and are trained as interpreters in Asian languages and are useful in assisting dialogue with Australian and Asian partners.
6)
In a globalised market the consumers of any product are sovereign, and catering to
them involves cultural and linguistic adjustment. For example, Australian live sheep and slaughtered meat exporters to middle Eastern and other Muslim countries have benefited from the local communities with their knowledge of the religious procedures for the preparation and slaughter of the produce and in many other areas.
7)
The commercialisation of medical, insurance, and valuation, educational and virtually
any other servic�_,..i\'vailable domestically is greatly enhanced by the addition of the language facilitation services that exist because of multicultural policies. Just as our government seems to believe that in some ways Australians can offer a sort of mediation between Asia and Europe I believe that South Africans may be able to perform similar roles for Asians and Europeans to southern Africa. All manner of industries are involved in the establishment and maintenance of such connections.
8)
Another way of viewing the effect of cultural diversity on economic activity is in the
overcoming of costs. In the mid 1970s drivers' licence tests were permitted on a multilingual basis. The argument for teaching people to drive in Australia in Vietnamese is as follows. People gain the knowledge offered to them more effectively, if it's delivered to them in a language they know. I( you want to teach a Xhosa-speaking person to drive and they don't know English very well, why would you try to do it through English? The effect would of course be to impoverish their understanding of the lesson. Knowledge imparted in Xhosa is not unavailable to them in English, it is simply transferred across languages. The same arguments hold true for industrial safety knowledge and many other areas where effective
communication is more important than the issue of what language it is offered in. The cost of
denying multilingualism, is accidents, misunderstandings, all sorts of problems. Servicing
multilingual populations monolingually is inefficient, ineffective and sometimes dangerous. 7)
A further instance that comes to mind readily is of a Melbourne construction firm with
a large number of Mediterranean origin workers. For some time the management laboured
under the monolingual myth, th,) misapprehension that it was simpler, cheaper etc. to deal
with all their workers, the Greeks, Italians, Portuguese, Spanish and Maltese labourers in English. Elaborate safety information was, as a result, imperfectly communicated, safety
jeopardised, and accidents, miscommunication and conflict resulted. A change in strategy,
using the naturally occurring affinity groups among the workers and utilising management with knowledge of the relevant languages, or worker-leaders in language groups, as well as
workplace English classes with some ·classroom· focus on relevant occupational as well as
general English, was judged by management to be more effective and less costly than denying
the diversity that existed. Similar stories abound. The Australian Tax Offie-e" in some studies
by one of the NLLIA's Research Centres was able to reduce workplace conflict by more
productively understanding culture and language issues relevant to its workers and make appropriate, negotiated workplace changes that made general operations more efficient and
effective as well as harmonious. 8)
In education it is relevant to consider the better effects of initial instruction in the
mother tongue, and the achievement rates of Aboriginal children are demonstrably improved when taught on the basis of their first language. I include this matter under the rubric of economics because I think that it is important that we don't close the economy off from human life, and in all the industries referred to earlier we are seeing human relationships and
economy coming together. 9)
Another multicultural benefit is the spectacular success of Aboriginal art.
I can't
imagine that such a phenomenon wouldn't also be true in this country. There are more people
who know about traditional dot painting and other forms of Aboriginal art in New York and
in Berlin than in some parts of Australia, and this is because it is the art success story of the
last 15 or 20 years. The visual imagery of Aboriginality. In Berlin or New York there has
been a high appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of Aboriginal painting.
Their first
encounter with it was as genuine art. For many Australians there was a barrier of prejudice
which precluded serious appreciation of the aesthetic values and uniqueness of indigenous art
forms and iconography.
Cultural products are commercialisable, and often commercialised. How much of Italy's vast
tourism industry is based on the perception, and promotion, of its artistic and archaeological
treasures as an economic resource. The distinctive cultural diversity of South Africa will, I
am sure, be utilised in this way as is the ancient Aboriginality of Australia.
There are
opportunities therefore for both cultural and linguistic research, maintenance and production in these encounters via tourism between visitors and hosts. 10)
In the Tanami Desert in Central Australia outside Alice Springs there are small
numbers of children who speak the Walbiri language separated by vast distances from each
other. They attenc;J#�everal schools, one at Santa Theresa, another at Lajamanu, separated by
enormous distances. The communities are in satellite contact with each other. This form of
communication, owned and controlled by the community, is put to effective and cost efficient educational use. A tiny language community can maintain and develop an education for its
children via such 'narrow casting'. The small numbers of students who are geographically dispersed from each other can be aggregated together by the satellite, under the supervision of
elders and others with traditional authority.
Travel costs are reduced, scarce specialist
teachers can be located in a single central place and community support structures can be
reinforced and strengthened, allowing viable educational programmes to be mounted at relatively small cost. 11)
The commercialisation of health and even legal services. Hospitals, blood banks, land
valuation authorities are marketing their wares to Asian and East European countries, as do
environmental clean-up operations and other waste disposal technology companies. Lifestyle,
health and recreational activity are more and more the province of developed nations as
rapidly industrialising nations out-compete us in the production of goods.
These are just some examples that come to mind from a vast number of possible ways in which the creative utilisation of cultural diversity can be economically productive and beneficial. Of course in Australia we seek common knowledge of �nglish but, unlike other markers of identity and human difference, languages allow multiplication, i.e. we can know, use and identify with more than one. Cultural diversity gives us contacts, knowledge and skills to prepare products appropriate to new and culturally different markets, to enter these markets and promote-market the goods and services which we are developing. Question: What is driving the internal and external economic changes? Within our economy changed work environments have elevated the importance of cultural diversity. I refer to such developments as flatter hierarchies. In many firms management advice is to break away from the rigid hierarchies of order, to substitute fewer hierarchies or flatter hierarchies, to involve employees more directly in discussions �5out issues such as occupational health and safety, commitments to the firm. This is a widespread change in management and enterprise culture. This is sometimes known as the Post-Fordist workplace, supplanting the rigidities of the Henry Ford production line with more collaborative workplaces. To some extent corporations are operating like mini-nations, inculcating loyalty and a sense of belonging to the firm. All such changes involve communication which in the past was not required: gone are the terse memoranda and in are meetings and quality circles and workshop committees and groups discussing innovation, safety, enterprise agreements of every conceivable type. If team work is to replace more directed work environments then cooperation is essential and the Samoans who work alongside the Turks and Cambodians on the production lines are drawn into relationships that for them, for all of us, are unprecedented. All these necessarily raise the issues of the languages, cultural expectations and educational levels of those involved which less collaborative workplaces did not need to concern themselves with to the same extent. A manifestation of such changes is the new informality of many workplaces. This is a whole process of 'culturing' people into the firm and believing in, and helping to shape, its culture.
Another relevant consideration is the greater complexity of operations, which is partly why
team work, multi-skilling and flatter hierarchies are considered useful. Such changes within
industry, both traditional and the more modern services and human industries, may have the effect of elevating the importance of language and cross-cultural skills and needs.
At the same time there are the changed industrial activities. I have mentioned them already:
tourism servicing and hospitality for example. These by some measures are the largest in the world, and of course the term 'industry' applies only by effort of extension to them. Another is education, commercialised education, and then there are many service industries such as insurance. If we regard them in this way we might conclude that the four or five largest
industries in the world, the fastest growing ones, the most remunerative, the ones employing ever larger numbers of people have nothing to do with cars, diamonds, wheat or wool. These
are industries whose prime characteristics are interpersonal encounters, human contact and
therefore human relationships form the core of these industries. Human relationships are founded on effecti,��communication, and this in turn is enveloped in cultural norms.
At the macro-economic level is the question of Jabour mobility. One of the major themes in
the restructuring of the Australian economy is to make workers more mobile. This mirrors what is happening on a global scale, migrations and population movements of unprecedented
volume and diversity, in all parts of the world. Executives are as mobile as the poor. The
large supra-national economic structures, APEC, EU and NAFTA (Asia Pacific Economic
Cooperation groups, European Union, North American Free Trade Agreement), etc. seek to create barrier-free trade. The liberalisation of population movement is one of the first areas
considered when free trading zones are negotiated. Executives plan lives that are temporarily located in Germany, Japan, Hong Kong or London. Multiple citizenships result.
Local
attachments become pro�Jematic. Transferable, and necessarily plural, skills are desired for
their children. At the opposite end refugee populations have more than quadrupled in recent
years. Every society is becoming multicultural. The notion of ethnically defined nations in
all parts of the world is being revised. Difference and diversity are being incorporated into
policies and programmes of public authorities everywhere.
The shift in global trading power. What we have seen (I think I said it at the very beginning)
is a decline in what I called the Anglo-American ascendancy in the economic sphere of the world, though not in others. Britain is now only the fourth largest economy in the EU and
.
although the US remains the world's largest single economy it is in effect less. and less a national economy and more and more an integrated web of economic activities with Asian
and European and Latin American economies. China is projected to exceed the size of the US
economy within a generation and equally grand projections are made about India. Whether or
not these are realised in fact matters little. The important point is that the consumers and producers of these nations and others form part of an emerging, though still insecure,
planetary economic system in which they are less dependent and more powerful than at any
time in recent history.
Question: Is this system certain to come about? Not at all. One of the influences of linguistic adaptation between groaf>s of people is the relative power of the interlocutors. Language choice is much about convenience, but not
entirely.
Language is more than communication - it also serves the functions of human
solidarity and identity.
linguistically.
Speakers often accommodate the wealthy and the powerful
I think it may be too soon to claim that nations are an anachronism. What we can more
confidently claim is that there are the makings of globalised interdependent network
economies and in the face of this, nations have ceded space to global market forces. Small
economies like Australia's and South Africa's must find their place through niche markets,
competitive advantage and regionalism.
Australia has opted for South and East Asian
regionalism. I would have thought that for South Africa a different sort of regionalism, Indian
Ocean regionalism and Southern African regionalism, would be likely. I think it likely that
the country could earn large dollars on the basis of the marketing of commercialised English
language education into these regions and tourism marketed into North America, Europe and North Asia.
Question: About the Reconstruction and Development Programme. From my reading of the Reconstruction and Development Programme it seems to reflect a
similar understandings of the directions in which economies are moving. In his introduction Mr Mandela says:
"The government will develop our human resources, facilitate labour market reform and establish collective bargaining based rights for all. " These sorts of changes elevate and bring into focus language issues in a direct way although this implication is not drawn out in the RDP document.
Under the rubric of 'addressing inequalities' Mr Mandela says "We'll expand markets at
home". Of course some of these may actually need to be created through the creation of
greater purchasipg' power among some sectors of the black population. Most of these will not
primarily function in either English or Afrikaans and the languages in which they do operate
will need to be the ones which advertisers will have to use to penetrate. So the strategy is to
access markets abroad and create them domestically. These are conceived as opportunities to promote representative ownership of the economy.
These statements are replete with
language implications despite not being specifically referred to.
The government will need active partnership with civil society, a multilingual civil society, a civil society that will have to be addressed in its languages, so that the RDP objectives can be realised.
The six principles of th� RDP - I counted seven but the document stated that there were six: 0 0 0 O
people driven peace and security nation building basic needs and infrastructure
0 democratisation 0 integration and sustainability 0 assessment and accountability.
To the extent that language permeates all social life it may well be a fa9t taken for granted in
the text. It is inextricably implicated in the principles of the Reconstruction and Development
Programme and the five key programmes, which are basic needs, human resources, building the economy, democratisation, and the implementation of the RDP. This is especially true of
the field of intervention, described as human resources development. Section 1.4.4, dealing with human resource development, considers public participation, education, cultural
diversity, knowledge creativity and skill.
Each of these self-evidently is mediated by
communication effectiveness. The absence of specific or sustained reference to the literacy,
basic education and communication effectiveness issues central to the achievement of each of
these goals may require that these concerns be separately targeted in appropriate ways via the
medium of an accompanying language and literacy plan.
I shall now briefly discuss each of the programmes and chapters with a vie, to highlighting
those elements which could sustain the multilingual goals of the constitutional provisions.
The scope for language is prominent in Chapter 2 of the RDP, though more by implication than by direct reference. Concerns about communication, interpreting and translating, and literacy issues surface. The criteria for the presidential projects (RDP p14, section 2.4.1)
contain a strong language implication which is, however, not mentioned. The creation of Minister without Portfolio and the accompanying communication strategy (page 17) which
states that the RDP is based on consensus and so depends on effective communication is a
potentially powerful sustaining argument for the practical use of the newly official languages.
Chapter 3 addresses economic policy. Section 3.2.1 specifically relates to jobs and tourism
but there is no reference to languages nor any tourism-specific human resource development projects or training.
Other sections which similarly seem to require specific language
planning and language or literacy training are: welfare, human resource development and
tourism. Each implies a strong multilingual, literacy, communication or an interpreting and translating element, but doesn't bring them out.
there is scope within the science and
technology programme objectives, especially in relation to the national campaign for science
and technology education for developmental research and projects of academic and specialist literacy, English for scientific purposes, and even specialist reading courses in German,
Japanese.
The fiscal policy and budget sections make no explicit reference to the costs of such training,
nor to the costs and difficulties of not undertaking any such training.
Public sector restructuring is a fertile area for the development and implementation of the
constitutional enshrinement of multilingualism. I refer to the affirmative action objectives,
the Public Service Training Institute, the creation of training modules and the delivery of training programmes for speakers of official but underrepresented languages. Cross-cultural
communication issues are not mentioned but seem to warrant specific inclusion.
The
languages that will be needed to service the community and to facilitate the inclusion of the
targeted new recruits to the public service were not mentioned but seem to warrant consideration even in a program primarily concerned with the broad economic and social
goals of the RDP.
The sections of the RDP dealing with Consultative Training Frameworks, especially the
national qualifications framework, heavily implicate language and literacy and cross-cultural
education for maximum effectiveness, or even to minimally apply in many instances. The
linguistic medium of such programmes may often be English or Afrikaans, though the policy
goals by implication favour the progressive utilisation of other languages. Those in English
will be bolstered with appropriate language and literacy support.
The empowerment of women, of youth, of rural and disabled peoples, is another RDP
objective that appears redQlent with multilingual support needs. The document states: "Young people are our country's most important resource."
A broader programme of empowerment for women is required. A comprehensive language policy would address youth literacy by multilingualism.
maintainers of bilingualism than men.
Women invariably are better
The whole issue of sign language, large-print language, and literature in talking book form are. all integral parts of language policy and might productively be incorporated into the relevant
section in Chapter 7.
The league projects in the President's section could usefully include references to interpreting and translating, general communications effectiveness across all areas of the country, plain language, African languages, and a research base.
In relation to the
national literacy
programme in the Taking the RDP Forward Report there is a comment that this programme is
unfunded and that support is required. It seems that it would be possible to target donor support to that one. These objectives seem highly amenable to targeted foreign aid and UNESCO's contribution to the nation's development.
Question: What 'pegs' does a language policy get tied to? Embedded in such 'mainstream' objectives as the RDP addresses are the societal domains that
most strongly would support the multilingual policies of the new dispensation and especially
its constitutional enshrinement.
There might then be overarching, or guiding principles for the formulation of the policy. One
is overcoming the costs of dysfunctional official monolingualism in multilingual settings, the second may address language resources, or benefits, that the society at large may derive.
The point of departure would probably be the constitutional entrenchment of multilingualism, this being, of course, a legal requirement.
A second determinant would be the data, existing and newly to be collected, on the linguistic
demography addressing also public attitudes and intentions and values concerning
Comprehensive knowledge of the societal correlates of languages and the literacy levels available in these is important. The classic methodology of language planning assembles such information as 'who speaks what to whom in what settings'. A programme of research to sustain and further develop, improve and modify the language policy is necessary. Obviously the overcoming of the history of linguistic discrimination would be a priority in such a policy, and would draw on that as a goal. Public policy, however, is always, or ought to be, the province of democratic processes for its formulation, adoption, evaluation and modification. Technicians, in this instance linguists (scientists and their knowledge), experts though they may be, are at most partners in the practice of language policy making. Rarely in fact have linguists been the makers of languages policies.
A vital component of the language policy is of course the Pan South African Language Board, its charter and mandate, and Langtag or whatever advisory mechanism is established. The research and consultation processes of these bodies will be of vital import.
From my observations it appears that there are three sustaining, broad goals that characterise the declarationltn language so far issued by the authorities. These are social justice (taking the specific form of redressing past injustices), economic efficiency (tempering goals with an eye to the practically achievable and the popular demand for realism) and 'making the most of the economic resources of the country' (this latter theme in the promulgated policies places stress on the urgent need for stimulating economic development and specifically marshalls all the citizens, in their diversity, towards the achievement of nationally unifying development goals). Recurring but less insistently repeated themes appear to be national cohesiveness, effective internal communication in the building of a 'new nation'.
A policy seems to be the intervening programming element between the constitutional
.
commitment and its enacting body (the Board). Some of its precise and staged goals would appear to be:
• • •
The rapid establishment of electronic and telephonic interpreting and translating . Adult basic education and literacy . Investment in strategically important foreign languages .
• • • • • •
Commercialised English as a foreign language. (I would have thought that under the RDP South Africa could become an English languages learning centre and teaching centre of Southern Africa, and even the Indian Ocean region to some extent.) Technical language development, especially in particular terminological domains in the Nguni and Sotho groups. The mechanisms for rendering more effective the declared language rights. • General bilingual education. Effective English teaching A coherent national or regional role for Afrikaans and the other 9 languages.
Question: Comment on local diversity and global linkages One of the issues that is perhaps not much mentioned is the way in which Afrikaar'ls is
possibly a medium for economic contact via Belgium and Holland into the European Union.
The interesting consideration about the European Union is that to enter one economy,
potentially and at least formally and legally, is to enter all 16. They are interlinked. The same trade, tariff and packaging rules apply across the twelve - now sixteen - countries.
Economically, Afrikaans and the other link directly through Southern Africa to neighbouring
countries. Gujarati, Hindi, and other languages that are spoken in the urban centres give access to India. India is growing at a rapid rate. The middle class in India consists of some 200 million people, though of course English is widely us�d. Other opportunities, admittedly
rather limited, exist into parts of South America and those remnants of Indonesia where Dutch
is spoken.
These links are not facilitated exclusively through foreign languages or English.
