Francesco Cavallaro

Language Maintenance Revisited: An Australian Perspective

Abstract 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 countrys 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 Australias languages are categorized loosely based on Thiebergers (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.

Overaccommodation in a Singapore eldercare facility

ABSTRACT Numerous studies have shown that some speech accommodation in interactions with the elderly can aid communication. Overaccommodaters, however, employing features such as high pitch, exaggerated prosody, and child-like forms of address, often demean, infantilise, and patronise elderly interlocutors rather than facilitate comprehension. According to the Communicative Predicament of Aging model, communication practices are determined by stereotypes of aging that are triggered in the minds of those interacting with the elderly. These stereotypes vary from culture to culture, and in Singapore, negative stereotypes of aging are prevalent, existing alongside traditional Confucian-influenced positive stereotypes. To date, no studies have examined whether or how stereotypes of aging might be manifested in interactions between younger and older Singaporeans. This investigation involved participant observation in a Singapore eldercare facility. Overaccommodation was indeed found to be employed by carers and varied qualitatively depending on the physical and cognitive abilities of the elderly, with healthy elderly addressed as one might address school-aged children and those with dementia addressed as infants. These results provide some initial insights into an issue that is extremely relevant to Singaporean society, given the city states rapidly aging population.

‘Touch’ Your Heritage: An Interactive Installation on Multilingual Identity

Using an online and touch screen interface, this paper explores language and cultural identity as a form of intangible heritage. The relationship between language and cultural identity has spawned several studies in various disciplines in the past few decades. This study represents a first attempt at visualising some of the issues relevant to cultural identity discussed by linguists, psychologists and cultural studies experts in an interdisciplinary collaboration between linguists and digital design heritage researchers and computer programmers. For the purpose of this study, an interactive program that centres on the issue of cultural identity, heritage and language was developed to engage participants. Via a touch screen, several prompts and triggers related to culture, identity and heritage were embedded for participants to choose. The engagement includes allowing the participants to emphasize one identity trait over another as well as minimising the less relevant traits. Participants explore their per...

2. Language in Singapore: From Multilingualism to English Plus

Introduction With active language planning policies in force since before its independence as a nation in 1965, Singapore’s linguistic situation has undergone dramatic change in the last 60 years. As a result of these policies, we have seen the waxing and waning of many languages and an unprecedented transformation of linguistic repertoires for individual Singaporeans. In particular, the last five decades have seen a significant shift to English plus one of the designated official languages, and the attrition of many other languages, including a diverse array of Chinese vernaculars. This chapter explores language policies and planning in Singapore and their impact, drawing on a number of studies, as well as on census and survey data. The chapter opens with a brief sociolinguistic description of the island state, and discusses the socio-historical basis for the adoption of the country’s language policies, the language planning and their implementation and impact. It then evaluates the direct implications of such language policies on the linguistic practices of the different ethnic groups, and briefly turns to the attitudes of Singaporeans towards their varieties of English. Finally, the chapter briefly considers the current and future consequences of language policy and change in Singapore. While Singapore’s language policy approach can be associated with positive outcomes, e.g. such as Singapore’s economic success, there are also negative consequences, including an increasingly reduced multilingualism, official rejection of local creativity in English and communicative dislocation within families and across generations.