Dr Bo Hu, Program Coordinator, Asia Education Foundation

Does growing up in Australia, speaking English at home and being educated in English at school make English your mother tongue? Yes, it certainly does.

However, in Australia’s multilingual households, it may not be so easy to identify someone’s mother tongue.

According to the 2016 Australian Census, approximately 21 per cent of Australian households speak a language other than English. Such a high rate of multilingualism raises many questions about how identifying someone’s mother tongue is determined. Is your mother tongue the language your parents use when they speak to you? Is it the language of where you were born? Is it the language you speak most competently? Is it simply the language you like more?

International Mother Language Day is a day to reflect on what mother language means and why this concept is important. For many Australians, it's also a day to reflect on the role that English has in your life when you speak a non-English language at home and are educated in English.

As educators, this is a day for us to consider what we can do to celebrate students’ mother tongues in the school.

Mother tongues are not static

In 1981, Finnish linguist and educator Tove Skutnabb-Kangas proposed multicriteria definitions of mother tongue, considering the factors of origin, competence, function (i.e. the most used language across different contexts) and attitudes. These definitions do not treat mother tongue as a static and unchangeable notion, which is highly relevant to new transnational Australian families’ dynamic day-to-day lives in which multiple languages are actively involved.

For example, in the case of Australian-born children from the Chinese community, their first mother tongue can be Shanghainese (mother tongue by origin), which was spoken to them by their parents. Later, after commencing schooling in Australia, English becomes their mother tongue (by competence and function). During this same stage, Shanghainese could remain their mother tongue if they identify with the language at an emotional level – for example, acknowledging the role of Shanghainese in creating and maintaining family intimacy and intergenerational communication.

Having a dynamic and detailed understanding of students’ mother tongue by different criteria, and of their general linguistic competence, can help educators know who their learners are. This helps breakdown the prevailing stereotypes that can make some educators assume that if a child looks like they have a Chinese background, they must be able to speak Mandarin.

Encourage children to speak their home language

Despite Australia being a multilingual country, English remains the dominant and most powerful language, with 73 per cent of the population speaking only English at home.

It is quite common to see second- or third-generation Australians of any background no longer speaking the language that their parents would identify as their mother tongue and becoming monolingual English speakers. The same language shift has also occurred with Indigenous Australian languages. At the time of the arrival of European settlers in 1788, there were more than 250 Indigenous Australian languages, and now only 13 of these languages continue to be actively passed on to children.

Loss of one’s mother tongue, or lack of opportunity to acquire literacy in the mother tongue or heritage language outside home, has implications on communication patterns, identity, sense of belonging and sense of family intimacy.

At a societal level, the loss of an entire community’s mother tongue can cause social segregation and turmoil.

The theme of the 2020 International Mother Language Day is "Languages without borders". Educators should encourage children to share their home language stories and to speak their home languages outside of their homes. This can be achieved by providing them with targeted language-sharing opportunities.

We can help to diminish the linguistic borders between households, the borders between individual speech communities, and the borders between linguistic minorities and the mainstream linguistic community.

This way, we can create a truly inclusive multilingual Australia without borders.

This article first appeared in ABC Education.