ESTUDIOS DE SOCIOLINGÜÍSTICA

Michael Clyne (2005). Australia’s Language Potential. Sydney: UNSW

Press. Pp. xii + 208. ISBN 0-86840-727-5.
INGRID PILLER
English Department, University of Basel, Switzerland
ingrid.piller@unibas.ch

In 2003 my mother, a monolingual German speaker, visited Australia to take

care of my one-year-old daughter. On most days, she would take her for a walk
through our Sydney suburb. As she pushed the stroller around, she would greet
everyone she met with “Grüss Gott”. I initially found this intensely embarrassing
and told her to just keep quiet or say ‘hi’–reckoning that one does not need to know
English to be able to say ‘hi’. However, as the days and weeks went by, I was
increasingly amazed at the number of acquaintances my mother made this way
–hardly a day went by when she did not meet a German speaker. She struck up
conversations with immigrants, L1 speakers from Germany and Austria, as well as
L2 speakers from Central Europe, with tourists and exchange students, with 2nd
generation Australians of German-speaking backgrounds, and with people who had
no German background but had learnt German in school, through travel, or personal
connections. There clearly was a lot more German spoken in the area than I, a
professional sociolinguist, had ever imagined.
This is also one of the key points of Michael Clyne’s new book exploring
Australia’s Language Potential: there is a lot of multilingualism in Australia, but it
goes largely unnoticed. The book is a passionate plea for valuing multilingualism
and against “the monolingual mindset”, which oftentimes renders Australia’s
multilingualism invisible and devalues it.
The first chapter sets out to “recognis[e] Australia’s multilingualism”. On the
basis of data from the 2001 census, Clyne paints a detailed picture of a society where
16 percent of the population claim a home language other than English –in the urban
centers of Sydney and Melbourne the figures are 29% and 27% respectively.
Nationally, the top ten community languages are Italian, Greek, Cantonese, Arabic,
Vietnamese, Mandarin, Spanish, Tagalog, German, and Macedonian, but there are
immense differences in terms of location (88 per cent of speakers of community
languages live in urban areas); in terms of growth rate (the number of Mandarin
speakers rose by 155.9% between 1991 and 2001, while the number of German
speakers fell by 32.6% during the same period); in terms of age-distribution (the three
community languages with the highest number of users in the 0-14 years age cohort

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are Arabic, Vietnamese, and Cantonese, while in the cohort of 55 and older, these
positions are occupied by Latvian, Lithuanian, and Dutch); and in terms of
concentration (there are municipalities like the Sydney suburb of Waverley where one
community language predominates, Russian in this case, alongside municipalities
with ethnolinguistically mixed populations, alongside municipalities with no
community language with more than 1,000 home users). In addition to measuring
concentration in terms of the linguistic landscape in a municipality, it can also be
measured in terms of language: in Sydney, Tamil, Japanese, and Turkish are the three
most concentrated community languages while German, Polish, and Cantonese are
the most dispersed ones. The chapter concludes with the observation that, “in spite of
periodic reports proclaiming the value of linguistic diversity for trade and tourism, the
resources are not being utilized very much in the business sector” (p. 21).
Consequently, the second chapter sets out to “valu[e] Australia’s
multilingualism”. This chapter is a passionate plea against “monolingualism”. First
and foremost, an ideology of monolingualism denies many people social justice in a
de-facto multilingual society such as Australia, and second, because an insistence on
English only denies the whole population, and particularly the younger generations,
social, cultural, economic and cognitive benefits that have been shown to derive
from high-level proficiency in two or more languages. The next chapter is devoted to
“fostering and transmitting multilingualism”. Here, Clyne explores the differential
rate of language shift in different communities: on the one end of the scale, we find
Australians born in Vietnam, Eritrea, Somalia, Iraq, Taiwan and Cambodia, only
4.0% or less of whom use only English at home. On the other end of the scale, there
are first generation migrants from Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, more than
50% of whom use only English at home. The shift rate is the lowest for Vietnamese
(2.4%) and the highest for Dutch (62.6%). Potential reasons for the differential shift
rate that the author adduces are cultural factors, namely cultural distance and
language as core value. “Cultural distance” means that language shift will be lowest
for groups with the greatest distance from the Anglo-Celtic mainstream. “Language
as core value” refers to whether language is seen as crucial to the ethnic identity or
not. Other factors in the explanation of the differential shift rate include period of
residence (e.g., 57.9% of Germany-born migrants arriving before 1986 had shifted
to English only by 2001, but only 25.3% of those arriving between 1996 and 2001);
gender (in most groups, men shift to English at a higher rate than women); age
(language shift rate related to date of migration); English proficiency (groups with a
large proportion of speakers with no English tend to have lower levels of language
shift); religion (groups with a sacral language have lower rates of shift),
concentration (the more speakers of a language there are in any one place, the better

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the language will be maintained); cost-benefit analysis (individuals may make a

rational choice to maintain their community language or not). I was surprised that
two factors that have a bearing on most aspects of social life were not taken into
consideration, namely race and class. I cannot help noticing that Caucasians have a
higher rate of language shift than non-Caucasians, and it would seem to me that
Caucasians can “pass” (Piller, 2002b) for mainstream Anglo-Celtic Australians if
they speak like them while this option is not open to non-Caucasians. Class would
seem another important factor that could further explain some of the German data,
for instance: post-WWII migration was mainly working-class, and there is a high
level of language shift for this group, as opposed to present-day migration whose
members are largely middle class and regard bilingualism as an asset (Piller, 2002a).
This chapter also contains advice on how to maintain a community language.
Chapter 4 is devoted to “strengthening and spreading multilingualism”, that is the
management of linguistic diversity through the school system. Similarly to language
education in other English-dominant countries, efforts at language education in
Australia can best be described as lukewarm. Nationally, only 13.1% of Year 12 students
take a language other than English. At the tertiary level, language offerings have been
dramatically cut in recent years, and it is, inter alia, no longer possible to study a
language such as Turkish at an Australian university. Arabic is another language that is
grossly underrepresented in the school system. Furthermore, some students who have
a background in a language they study are made to run with a handicap through
practices such as global scaling and differential assessment. The obvious weaknesses
in the Australian educational system as regards languages are a symptom of and
further contribute to an ideology that considers multilingualism as “un-Australian”, in
the same way that Scottish school children reportedly see languages other than English
as gay (<<http://news.scotsman.com/education.cfm?id=333232006>>; last viewed
March 13, 2006).
The next chapter provides a historical overview of language policy in Australia,
and the final chapter provides recommendations on “supporting multilingualism
collaboratively”. These are aimed at government, schools, universities, communities
and ethnic schools, as well as families.
Obviously, this book is first and foremost intended for an Australian audience.
Other than that, it will also be of value to sociolinguists with an interest in how
multilingualism is managed in a nation, which the author, with good reason, believes
“to be tolerant and harmonious by international standards” (p. 182). Beyond this
rather narrow audience, I believe that most readers of this journal will, like myself,
find the author’s effort at “writing out” inspiring, even if they may be of different
methodological or theoretical persuasions.

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Bibliographical references
Piller, I. (2002a). Bilingual Couples Talk: The Discursive Construction of Hybridity.
Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Piller, I. (2002b). “Passing for a Native Speaker: Identity and Success in Second
Language Learning”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6(2), 179-206.


Henri Boyer (sous la direction de) et Carmen Alén Garabato, P. Baccou, M.-
L. Rouquette (2006). De l’école occitane à l’enseignement public: vécu et
représentations sociolinguistiques. Paris: L’Harmattan. Pp. 162. ISBN 2-
7475-9885-3 (hbk).
E.M.M. LE PICHON-VORSTMAN
Université François Rabelais, Tours, France
emmanuellevorstman@hotmail.com

This book focuses on the analysis of interviews with fourteen former students
of a French- Occitan immersion elementary school. The researchers’ objective was
to assess the degree of success or failure of this particular type of school, that
adopted the Freinet method of teaching, and of the immersion bilingual education in
a minority language, Occitan, in general. Occitan is in danger of disappearing, and
has no longer been transmitted in the family contexts since the 1950s.
Approximately one half of the book consists of the transcribed oral interviews
(corpus), allowing the reader to better follow the authors’commentaries, and to form
his or her own opinion. Three different perspectives on the single study are
presented. First, Boyer and Alén Garabato focus on the sociolinguistic parameters in
this particular language contact situation based on their conversations with the
subjects. Their analysis introduces a contextualized approach to the issue of
language representation, a focus borne out of sociology and social psychology.
Second, Baccou, a teacher at the school, briefly comments on his experience. Finally,
Rouquette analyzes the results from a psycho-sociologic perspective. This last part is
particularly interesting since the results contradict the following commonly accepted
notions:

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