Storying multilingualism in Sydney

Language is an issue of public concern in Australia, or to be more specific, not speaking English is an issue. The 2016 census shows 22.2% of all Australia and 38.2% of Greater Sydney households speak a language other than... [ view full abstract ]

Language is an issue of public concern in Australia, or to be more specific, not speaking English is an issue. The 2016 census shows 22.2% of all Australia and 38.2% of Greater Sydney households speak a language other than English. But the national level of uptake for language study at school dropped from about 40% in the 1960s to lower than 10% in 2016, and this figure already included students who are native speakers of a language. The decline in the number of language learners does not necessarily make Australia less of a multilingual nation, but it does beg the question whether Australia really has a monolingual mindset. This paper investigates the visibility and storying of multilingualism from three perspectives: representation of culture and language in schools, provision of community language education, and provision of language support for public service access. Textual and interview data are collected from three on-going projects with community organizations which serve the most culturally and linguistically diverse areas in Sydney. This paper will discuss how community stakeholders use textual and oral narratives to story multilingualism as everyday experience, and in turns use storying to reshape social imaginaries of multilingualism in Sydney.