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Language and Society Centre

The Language and Society was established at Monash University in 1991 as part of the National Languages (and Literacy) Institute of Australia, an ARC and Commonwealth Government funded collaborative key centre. It was also successful subsequently in gaining large and small projects from government and non-government organizations. Since 1999 it has been an independent centre of Monash University.

Its main areas of research have been and are:

Much of this research has been community or school based.

Recent work has included a major report commissioned by the Victorian Interpreting and Translating Service on Victoria’s language demography, language resources and language service needs:

Julie Bradshaw, Ana Deumert and Kate Burridge with Louisa Willoughby and Meredith Izon, Victoria’s Languages: Gateway to the World. (January 2008)

Details of its launch and publication will be available in the near future.

Other ongoing projects include research on ethnic schools and on inter-cultural communication in the medical field.

A number of larger projects are being developed or updated:

  1. The sociolinguistic profile of south-eastern Melbourne (encompassing numerous studies of language demography, the languages of new African groups, language maintenance and shift, second language acquisition, and inter-cultural communication).

  2. Inter-generational interaction between students of German, Italian or Spanish and healthy elderly speakers of those  languages in Melbourne (an inter-disciplinary project)

  3. Inter-cultural communication – cultural variation in academic discourse; inter-cultural communication at work and in business, in English as a lingua franca

  4. Research leading to the enhancement of languages-in-education policies and improved practice in primary and secondary school programs.

  5. Dimensions of Australian English -  based on data from Year 10 students in ten Melbourne schools across suburbs, socioeconomic backgrounds, gender, school type, - conversations with strangers, same age friends and within three generations of families.
    There has also been a pilot sample from families in two parts of the the Western District. This project will be extended and followed up.
  6. Indigenous Language of Victoria Revival and Reclamation. – ongoing linguistic analysis of early published and archival material for the Indigenous languages of Victoria. (Current ARC Linkage Grant 2007-8 involving partners organizations from the education sector and Indigenous groups in Victoria) .

The above projects build on longstanding research interests of Monash scholars.  The colleagues participating are from the Linguistics, English as an International Language, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish programs of the School of Languages Cultures and Linguistics, and collaboration is being planned with the Faculty of Education and some other sections of the University, including the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences.

It is proposed to hold in the second week of June a University-wide workshop at which colleagues will be invited to present briefly their current and recent research projects.

The Centre will also be sponsoring a public lecture in August to celebrate the International Year of Languages.

For further information, please contact: