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Next week, on 7 June in Canberra, will be an event Languages in crisis, at the National Press Club. It's billed as a "National Languages Summit, calling for simple, effective measures to utilise and develop our national language capacity". It's organised by the Academy of Humanities, and they're going to launch a Research Paper.

BUT, the rumour is that "national language capacity=foreign language capacity". Nothing about the crisis in bilingual education for Indigenous students. Nothing about Indigenous languages at all....

Comments

Hi Jane,

The Summit's ambit was indeed inclusive of Australian languages, and there were some professionals present who are expert in our indigenous languages. Pretty much the only languages not in range were ancient languages and English.

So as long as there is a community of speakers, we are interested in promoting a smarter policy to develop and/or strengthen capability in languages of relevance to Australia. I can't think of any more relevant than those languages that evolved and that are spoken here on our own continent!

Cheers,
John

PS - the research paper was released by the Group of 8, not us, but we do welcome increased polciy discussion in languages education.

Posted by: John Byron | June 12, 2007 03:47 PM

The Academy of Humanities link has changed:

http://www.humanities.org.au/Policy/Languages/default.htm

Mame du Bois

Posted by: Mame du Bois | August 17, 2007 07:03 PM

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