The vogue for fashionable ideas in sociology is fickle. Sociologists eagerly latch onto what appear to be new bodies of thought; they toy with them for awhile (organising symposium to discuss their significance for the discipline, giving over special editions of the discipline's journals to them, and proliferating texts that debate their merits), but then, often as not, sociology moves on. Giddens and Turner's (1987) Social Theory Today, is, in some respects, a partial history of fashionable thought in sociology. Many of the ‘theories’ they include once held the attention of the whole discipline, but now, by and large, whilst they still have their adherents, sociology is not as keenly focussed upon the distinctive issues they raise as it once was. The bloom of the ‘new moment’ fades, and it becomes part of the humus of ‘social theory today’ which generally nourishes the discipline.

The way in which sociology generates, and then accommodates, the advent of a ‘new moment’, tells us something about the business of sociology. Both the merchandisers and consumers of ‘new moves’ work that business in their testimony to what they constitute, even in their seeming mercurial character, as ‘the stable properties of the discipline's foundations’. This means that despite the radical claims that often accompany the development of a ‘new body of thought’ there is just as often a comforting conceptual, epistemological, and methodological familiarity to the arguments.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

So far, I have put language maintenance and shift in Australia into a historical context and examined the statistical data on the distribution and fate of community languages. I have also attempted to isolate variables promoting language maintenance or shift, for explanatory and predictive objectives, in relation to various the oretical frameworks. Some of the data are general, others domainspecific, such as those relating to home use. This chapter will be devoted to the functions and domains in which community languages are employed in the supportive context of contemporary Australia. Due to the enormity of the data-gathering task, my data base will necessarily be limited. Where possible, 1986 statistics are given since this was also the year of our Census data.

DOMAIN AND CODE-SELECTION

From Chapter 2 we see that community languages are employed widely in private and public domains. The role of domain in the code-selection of bi-and multilinguals has been an important discovery in the sociology of language (Fishman 1965, 1966, 1985a; Cooper 1967; Greenfield 1970). Domains are contextualized spheres, or total interactional contexts of communication, such as home, work, neighbourhood, school and local religious unit. However, domains themselves are not the only significant factor in code selection. Sankoff(1971) shows that interlocutors (and their ethnic ascription, something which often correlates with age, see below) play an important role, even more so than situation, topic, style and medium.

Introduction

If social theory is going to pay any attention at all to the nature of ‘the social actor’, then how is that actor to be conceived? For some approaches to social theory (the structuralism of Althusser, 1971, 1976 and 1979, and Lévi-Strauss, 1963 are notable examples) there is little if any need for such a conception. The human sciences, for them, are not concerned with ‘individuals’ but with social wholes, and insofar as any conception of the social actor is needed then its development will be low priority, and the needs of its theorising can perhaps as well be served by leaving any conception of the social actor largely implicit. Other approaches to sociological theory think that a conception of the social actor is their necessary and fundamental basis, that they must found their understanding of society in ‘the actor's point of view’. These two broad orientations have a long-standing, even traditional, opposition, though they have relatively recently been joined by another position (Derrida, 1976 and 1978; Foucault, 1972; and Lyotard, 1979, being significant examples) which calls a plague on both their houses, telling us that both ‘the subject’ and ‘the social totality’ are mere fictions, by-products of the play of discourse and text.

Though the concern with social wholes regards the issues of the social actor as low priority, its very attempt to justify this evaluation contributes to direct controversy about the nature of the social actor, for making the case on behalf of locating sociological analysis primarily at the level of the totality involves arguing against the idea that social actors could possibly be self-determined.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

One of the effects of the tension between monolingualism and multilingualism in Australia has been that some people develop and maintain bilingualism, while others shift mainly or totally to English. This is the focus of Chapter 2.

In this chapter I will first examine the distribution of languages other than English in, and throughout Australia. Three sets of data, each distinctive and useful but in their own ways limited, form the basis of our information on community language behaviour in Australia. They are:

1. the 1976 Census, which inquired about languages used regularly by persons aged 5 and over;

2. the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 1983 Survey, administered on only two-thirds of 1 per cent of the population aged 15 and over, which elicited language(s) first used and currently used in specific domains and channels (home, work, socially; in speaking, reading and writing);

3. the 1986 Census which gathered data on home language of the entire population.

Having drawn attention to weaknesses in the questions and in the processing of the responses, I shall make a comparison between the 1976 and 1986 data, and discuss regional variation. The statistics and the results of small-scale surveys will be used to discuss the relative language maintenance and shift in different ethnolinguistic groups and the variables mediating language maintenance and shift.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter deals with the formal aspect of the community languages that are being used, maintained and rejected in Australia. I shall discuss how limited use of and exposure to community languages as well as English influence have led to changes in the way in which speakers of the languages in Australia use them. I shall also address interlingual code-switching and its causes, and attempt to assess the possible implications for linguistic theory of Australian language contact phenomena (notably syntactic change and code-switching). Non-linguists may prefer to disregard the sections on grammatical change and code switching, pp. 176–84 and 191–207

As early as 1950, Haugen pointed to the theoretical gains that could be derived from studying languages of different typologies all in contact with the same language (English). Australia is an outstanding linguistic laboratory for this. However, of the approximately 100 community languages spoken in Australia today, hardly a dozen have so far been subjected to detailed linguistic analysis, and almost all of these are Germanic, Romance or Slavic languages.

THE DATA

The main corpus base in this chapter is that examined for my studies of German and Dutch in Australia — drawn from tapes of the following: 200 German-speaking postwar migrants and their children and 200 Dutch-speaking postwar migrants and their children (Clyne 1967, 1977a); 50 German-speaking pre-war refugees (Clyne 1973); 70 Australian-born children of pre- and postwar German-speaking emigrants; and 340 descendants of German pioneer settlers in rural areas of South Australia, Victoria, and southern New South Wales (Clyne 1968a, b).

This monograph aims at providing an up-to-date account of the situation of community languages in Australia. It has three types of readers in mind:

• linguists and students of linguistics in Australia;

• linguists overseas who wish to become more acquainted with the Australian situation, which may bear some similarities to that in their own country; and

• more general readers and colleagues in other disciplines in Australia.

For the benefit of the last-mentioned group, definitions of linguistic terms are provided in the text and in the Glossary. Note that terms followed by an asterisk when first used in the text are explained in the Glossary.

Chapter 1 provides an historical treatment of the tension between monolingualism and multilingualism in Australia, which is fundamental to much of the later chapters. Chapter 2 uses as its starting point data on languages, derived from recent censuses. This is applied to correlate various factors with language maintenance and shift. Theoretical implications of the correlations are considered. The spheres and situations in which community languages are employed in Australia are presented in Chapter 3. The fourth chapter examines the changes to which some community languages are being subjected in contact with English, and the implications of this for the study of language change. Australian language policies, in particular the National Policy on Languages, are the subject of Chapter 5. Many of the issues treated in this book have been discussed elsewhere, in articles in academic journals and other periodicals or in volumes that are not very generally accessible. I am drawing together work done by others as well as myself to present a general overview of community languages in Australia.

At a recent symposium of the American Sociological Association celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Structure of Social Action (Parsons, 1937), Jeffrey Alexander called attention to the book's continuing influence upon professional sociology. In the generosity of the celebration, he situated ethnomethodology's programme in the agenda of analytic sociology and offered ethnomethodology good advice.

From his place within the agenda, he identified for all ethnomethodologists the studies they do, advised them of studies they should do, and offered friendly advice about emphases they cannot avoid. In thoughtful reflections, he praised ethnomethodological studies for carrying on with the problem of social order that Parsons specified, and with which he instituted formal analytic sociology. In a spirit of generosity Alexander offered ethnomethodology an olive branch. Rather than pursuing their programme of current studies – which in another context he has criticised as ‘individualistic’ – ethnomethodologists should celebrate The Structure of Social Action by returning to the analytic fold.

I disagree. There are good reasons for ethnomethodological studies to specify the production and accountability of immortal, ordinary society – that miracle of familiar organisational things – as the local production and natural, reflexive accountability of the phenomena of order*. Among those reasons is making discoverable one of those phenomena of order*, but only one, namely what analysis incarnate in and as ordinary society, as practical action's locally and interactionally produced and witnessed embodied details, could adequately be.

Introduction

One of the more notorious of Garfinkel's methodological recommendations, exemplified in his early ‘breaching experiments’, was the importance of rendering the familiar strange in order to make visible the work necessary to sustain the common understandings and practical reasoning that is the basis of the social order (Garfinkel, 1967). For Garfinkel, of course, no activity could, in principle, be exempt from this proposal, least of all sociology itself. The radicalness of Garfinkel's recommendations is manifested and celebrated in the contributions to this volume and, of course, elsewhere. Our concern in this chapter is to develop in depth a methodological issue which is deeply rooted in the human sciences and which arises from out of the general concern with measurement as considered by Mike Lynch in the preceding chapter: the structure of evidence and inference as exhibited in that family of techniques known by a name popularised, though in condemnation, by Blumer, as ‘variable analysis’ (Blumer, 1956). These techniques encompass not only the standard means of data collection in social research, such as questionnaires of all types, interviewing, the organisation of the inferential basis of these in survey designs and the principles of sampling, but also the sophisticated, and increasingly esoteric arsenal of statistical analysis. For most practising sociologists, and social researchers more generally, variable analysis is the familiar set of methods of social research against which all other approaches have to be judged and weighed.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

Apart from the 150 Aboriginal languages, more than one hundred languages other than English are in use in Australia today. In the 1986 Census, 13.63 per cent of the Australian population (15,604,150 at the time) were reported as using a language other than English at home, and many more employ one away from their home (see below, pp. 39–40). However, it is not only in the post-World-War-II period that Australia could be described as a multilingual society. Ethnolinguistic diversity existed, and, in fact, thrived in some parts of Australia from the early days of European settlement. There were periods during the past 200 years when multilingualism was recognized, or even promoted. There were others when it was ignored, or outlawed.

It has been stated (Bostock 1973) that Australian governments have directed their policies towards achieving monolingualism. And yet Australia has an ethnolinguistic mix probably unparalleled in any other nation. It now has a more comprehensive and positive National Policy on Languages than any comparable country. This paradox is characteristic of a tension that has existed, throughout the history of white settlement in Australia, between three symbolic relationships of language and society: English monolingualism as a symbol of a British tradition; English monolingualism as a marker of Australia's independent national identity; and multilingualism as both social reality and part of the ideology of a multicultural and outreaching Australian society. This tension predates the federation of six British colonies into an Australian nation in 1901, and has not yet been resolved.

The historical relationship of Australians to the Australian national variety of English lies outside the scope of this monograph (see Collins and Blair 1989.)