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May 21, 2011: «Speaking one’s mother tongue is vital», The Australian

Daily paper The Australian, very committed to the promotion of liberalism and the market economy, read by the political and economic elites, has published an article that may have surprised its regular readers. Indeed the article takes up whole portions of a postscript included in Noel Pearson’s newly reissued Radical hope. Much, much to ponder on…
But who is Noel Pearson? An Australian lawyer and activist for the rights of the Aboriginal people, who founded the Cape York Institute for Policy and leadership in favor of social and economic development of the Cape York Aboriginal communities. He’s also an indigenous leader known as a highly convincing political theorist and commentator.
Parson here argues that the command of English is not the only condition for success of Aboriginal Australians: the command of Aboriginal languages is also vital, and their recognition is crucial for these populations who suffer all the consequences of deculturation to recover hope.
Here are a few excerpts of this article which we encourage you to refer to on The Australian’s website.
« I wrote in 2009 that our hope depends on education: Radical hope for the future of Aboriginal Australia will require the bringing together of the Enlightenment and Aboriginal Australian culture. The education of our children in both traditions is fundamental to this hope.
« On Cape York Peninsula we have shown that our vision is feasible: that all Aboriginal Australian children, even those in remote areas, can have a primary education that enables them to proceed to quality secondary and tertiary education, and take their place in the national and global communities. (…)
« Anglophones, such as non-indigenous Australians, have difficulty understanding the existential angst of small ethnicities. It is easy to see why. The English language and the Anglophone culture are the most powerful forces in history. (…)
« I wrote that one of the best gifts for a child is absolute command of English and the Anglophone tradition. However, the greatest gift for a child in Australia (…) is to have another language, a mother tongue, a language of the heart that is not English. (…)
« The Anglophone culture may be history’s greatest, but (…) there are some ideas that have been better comprehended by other cultures; the importance of multilingualism, and how multilingualism is preserved, is one of them.
« The Swedes on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, for centuries separated from Sweden and for long periods under Russian or Soviet domination, said all that needs to be said in the title and in the first lines of their unofficial anthem, The Song of the Mother Tongue:
How sweetly the song resounds
In beloved mother tongue,
Consoling grief,
Honing the steel of the mind . . .
« Feeling the threat of their minority culture’s extinction, these Swedes picked the mother tongue as the sole theme of their anthem. They correctly observed that it is in your mother tongue that you have intellectual and spiritual freedom (…). But, significantly, the first thing the anthem says is that the mother tongue consoles grief. All members of minorities understand why this is said first. There is much sorrow in human life; minorities face the additional grief of not being in charge of their people’s destiny and the prospect of their cultural obliteration from history’s page. (…)
« We do need economically and socially sustainable lives; but it is our cultural link with the past – a link that would break without language – that makes our lives spiritually sustainable as members of a conquered people. What we need more than anything else is to see that our tongues are not dying languages spoken only in a few homes but languages with a future: growing, officially recognised languages of Australia. (…)
« If you don’t know an indigenous Australian language, learn one (…). If you know an indigenous Australian language, improve your grasp of it (…). Then speak it to the children. This is the noblest and worthiest cause for an Australian patriot ».
For Maïa Ponsonnet’s blogs on the linguistic situation of Australia:
– The Australian tradition of multilingualism and the post-colonial context
– The ideology of monolingualism in the Australian context