It was such a great opportunity to be part of the new podcast series “Tongue Tied and Fluent” produced by Sheila Pham and Masako Fukui.

The first episode deals with the question of whether Australia is ready for a multilingual mindset?

“We speak around 300 languages in Australia yet English, our de facto national language, dominates every aspect of our public life. So you’d be forgiven for forgetting just how multilingual we are because it’s a part of our national identity we’re uncomfortable with. Australia is ‘a graveyard for languages’ with the majority of introduced languages disappearing after a few generations. But what we see here in this country reflects how English is the ‘hyper-central language of globalisation’, a description coined by the Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan. Should we resist this tendency towards monolingualism?”

Listen to the episode here.