Page 3608 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 13 September 2017
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understand our world. To this day there are things that I understand in Tongan that I just do not know how to understand in any other language.
International Mother Language Day, which this motion calls upon the ACT government to observe, has its origins in the Bengali language movement. When the government of Pakistan ordained Urdu as the sole national language on 23 February 1948, extensive protests broke out among the Bangla-speaking majority of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. The government attempted to suppress discontent by outlawing public meetings and rallies, but the movement could not be stopped and a protest on 21 February 1952 turned deadly when police fired upon and killed a number of protesters.
Some people might argue that a language is a trivial thing to be willing to die for, but I understand. For the people of East Pakistan, this was not just about their language but about the culture embedded in that language and about their sense of who they were as a people. To be robbed of Bangla was to be robbed of their identity and their values—their way of seeing and understanding themselves and the world around them.
Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to join with Canberra’s vibrant Mon refugee community in celebrating their national day. They too understand the relationships among language, culture and identity. One of the main tools that the Burman military rulers used strategically to attempt to strip the Mon people living in Burma of their identity was the banning of their language in schools and in print. For decades these brave people have resisted by forming literature and culture organisations in every Mon village, and in the past few years the restrictions on Mon publications finally appear to have been loosened.
In this motion, the importance of learning and speaking English competently for all Australians is not disputed, but it is important to emphasise that Australia is not a monolingual society. People often speak English at work or at school and a completely different language at home or in their place of worship. According to the latest census, almost 22 per cent of ACT households speak a language other than English. We should do all we can to celebrate and encourage this great linguistic diversity and its important role in supporting and facilitating genuine cultural diversity.
Access to different languages brings with it access to different ideas, different ways of seeing the world, and different ways of thinking and being. I want my children to have access to this richness and so have encouraged them to participate in Tongan language school.
This past Saturday, the ACT Community Language Schools Association held an annual dinner to celebrate all of the languages currently taught by its 50 school members. These include Arabic, Bangla, Cantonese, Croatian, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Greek, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Karen, Khmer, Korean, Macedonian, Mandarin, Maori, Mon, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Punjabi, Russian, Samoan, Serbian, Sinhalese, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Tongan and Vietnamese. How great is this?
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