Language Maintenance Revisited: An Australian Perspective

Language maintenance has been an issue debated whenever languages come into contact. This paper presents a detailed discussion of the reasons most often cited as to why languages should be maintained, with a specific focus on Australia because of the country’s multilingual makeup. Australia currently has about 150 aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages still in use, and more than 100 languages other than English are spoken by its immigrant population. However, these diverse language resources have been allowed to steadily decline. The arguments for the maintenance of Australia’s languages are categorized loosely based on Thieberger’s (1990) work and each of the arguments is discussed: (a) group intergrity and group membership, (b) identity, (c) cultural heritage, (d) socialhumanitarian and economic implication, (e) assimilation, and (f) cognitive development and academic achievement. This paper argues that there are many apparent advantages to maintaining languages. Linguistic Diversity in Australia Multilingual societies, such as Australia, offer great opportunities for indepth sociolinguistic studies, including those focusing on the idea of language maintenance (LM) and shift. Language shift and its ramifications are among the most important aspects of situations where different languages come into contact because most often through social or political processes one or more language(s) become dominant at the expense of the others. This is certainly the case in Australia. The languages spoken by the original inhabitants of this country and those spoken by its immigrants have all lost out to English, and most of these languages are close to becoming extinct (in the case of aboriginal languages) or relegated to the status of foreign languages with no native speakers living in Australia.