SANDRA KIPP, MICHAEL CLYNE, & ANNE PAUWELS,
Immigration
and
Australia's
language
resources.
(Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research
Publications.) Canberra: Australian Government Publishing
Service, 1995. Pp. xvi, 168. A $19.95.
AbstractOnly a few years ago it would have sounded bizarre
to call language a “resource,” except in the
respectable sense of culture or literature. And yet, long
before Coulmas's 1992 study of language and economy,
the majority of the world's language users had a working
understanding of the notion that language can be used to
leverage wealth. The smaller the language/culture, the
more acute the awareness of the importance of world languages
for trade and commerce. It is just in the English-speaking
world – for understandable if not necessarily laudable
reasons, based on the world hegemony of English –
that this realization has been slower to surface. Significantly,
it is in some of the less self-assured domiciles of English,
including Australia and New Zealand, that the realization
has emerged with compulsive force. With Britain's
entry into the Common Market, Australia and New Zealand
became suddenly and acutely aware of the need to forge
a bond with Asia. From bond to bond-market was a short
step, with language providing a bridge.
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