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Indo-Australians lobby for their languages

Paritosh Parasher in Sydney

Community leaders from the Indian subcontinent are urging their compatriots to specify which regional language they speak at home in a bid to get them due recognition during the Australian Census 2001.

Even ethnic language organisations and media have joined the campaign asking more and more Australians from the subcontinent to mention languages like Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and Tamil among others in the 'Language spoken at home other than English' column in the census, which took off on Tuesday.

The main reason for this linguistic bracketing is that the communities do not want to be left behind in 'true' representation in government statistics as they decide the allocation of resources.

As a result of 'insufficient' Australians mentioning Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi or Urdu as the languages spoken at home, government information brochures and directions do not have anything in any language from the subcontinent.

Radio broadcast slots on state-owned ethnic language radio stations like SBS also restrict allocation of time slots to Hindi or Urdu to just two hours a week -- the same as languages spoken by small ethnic groups like Maltese or Dutch.

Jaya Sharma, Australia's renowned Hindi language media professional and SBS anchorperson at Melbourne, told the Indo-Asian News Service: "SBS determines the duration of a particular language programme broadcast based on the census and after conducting intensive research.

"It is for a particular community to get the right representation by mentioning the fact that they speak a second language at home in the censuses."

But the census has also revealed the insecurities of practitioners and guardians of major languages from the subcontinent as not many expatriates are returning their mother tongues as the 'language spoken at home'.

Second-generation Indo-Australians seem to be moving away from languages like Hindi and Urdu. The main reason for this is attributed to the 'apathy' of Hindi-speaking parents and elders towards, among other languages, the fifth most spoken language of the world -- Hindi.

Prahlad Srivastava, Sydney-based president of Australia Hindi Indian Association, told the Indo-Asian News Service: "I do not blame our younger generation for not taking much interest in learning Hindi. They do not do so as we, their elders, fail to inculcate the pride for this language in them."

Some SBS Radio journalists have also voiced their support for the campaign. Hindi programmes on August 5 asked listeners to fill in "Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu or which ever language you speak at home".

But almost every participant in a talkback organised by SBS Urdu national programme the same day implored listeners to mention "only Urdu" in the column. Punjabi-speaking Pakistanis were warned not to return Punjabi as the medium of communication "even if you speak it at home".

Moderators and participants said that in the last census in 1996, a lot of Pak-Australians had returned Punjabi as the language spoken at home. "The benefit of this mistake went to Gurmukhi [the script of the Punjabi language spoken by people from India] and Urdu had to suffer," fumed a caller during the SBS Urdu programme.

What defies this apprehensive parochial attitude, however, is the fact that in the last census 54 per cent Pakistani Australians had returned Urdu as the language spoken at home. Only three per cent mentioned Punjabi, even though more than 60 per cent Pakistani Australians come from West Punjab, Pakistan's part of the province.

But the concern of the guardians of Hindi is much more serious than probably that of any other linguistic group in Australia. Though there are recorded instances of Hindi (or 'Hindustani', a mix of Hindi and Urdu) having reached Australia before the middle of the 19th century, the recorded number of Hindi speakers is alarmingly low. This, even though the size of the Indian community is increasing with every annual migrant intake.

There are about 180,000 Australians of Indian origin in the country. The size is more impressive if one adds another 40,000 Indo-Fijians, almost all of whom speak Hindi at home.

Yet, what is surprising is the paltry number of Indo-Australians who said they spoke Hindi at home in the last census. Fifty-six per cent India-born Australians returned English as their first language. Hindi managed to secure just about 12 per cent of this number. Punjabi scored an impressive 8 per cent.

Of the 53,745 Fijians (both Indo-Fijians and native Fijian migrants), an impressive 50 per cent mentioned Hindi as their spoken language, easily making them the largest Hindi-speaking group in Australia. But this wasn't enough to promote Hindi to the ranks of the first 15 most spoken languages in Australia.

Indo-Asian News Service

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