Indifference to Indonesian means the language could be all but extinct in Australian universities by 2031.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong warns there are fewer people studying Indonesian than 50 years ago – twice the number of high school students take German and five times as many French.
The problem is Australians just aren’t interested in learning languages but community pressure keeps geographically irrelevant ones on life-support.
A few years back La Trobe University decided to cut Greek, Hindi and Indonesian on the not unreasonable grounds that nobody much wanted to learn them. The local Greek, and on a smaller scale Indian, communities came over all outraged.
There was a campaign to save Greek and the Victorian government kicked in $40,000 in scholarships, on the not entirely plausible grounds that they celebrated the 200th anniversary of Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire.
But without vocal and politically connected supporters Indonesian was abolished.
The Italians of Adelaide used the same strategy when Flinders University wanted to drop their ancestral tongue. They complained that announcing the cut around the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death “shows a profound lack of respect for the Italian community at large”, which was drawing a long bow, in any language. But last year, when there still were insufficient students, the state government provided $1m over three years for Finders and Uni South Australia to keep teaching and running study tours.
Macquarie is teaching-out Greek and Italian courses but only after protracted protests.
It is still possible to take courses in Euro languages and cultures, while nobody much is learning that of our giant neighbour – a nation of immense strategic significance now and into the future.
Language education expert Liam Prince says 33,000 students were learning Indonesian in 2013, which dropped to 20,000 by 2022.
“The last time we had that number was at the turn of the century, when we the population was much smaller. We are doing particularly badly,” he says.
Certainly Australian universities are starting to pay attention to Indonesia. Deakin, Monash and Western Sydney now have campuses there. But in terms of cultural exchange Australians pretty much expect that while we might go to Indonesia geographically they will come to us linguistically.
“We assume other countries will do the work and that everybody will speak English,” says Prince, who runs the Australian Consortium for “In-Country” Indonesian Studies, which does what it says it does – sending students from 21 nearly all Australian universities on immersion tours to Indonesian institutions. Covid cut numbers but short (four to six-week) and semester-long programs have bounced back with hundreds of participants
It’s an immensely important product, creating a cadre of young people with language skills and the cultural awareness Australia needs to do business with our neighbours and who will be needed if, more likely when, we need to expand our people-to-people engagement with Indonesia.
That Indonesia and Russia have just completed naval exercises is no big military deal but it demonstrates Jakarta won’t be taken for granted.
And we are way short of a national awareness of Indonesia as a culture supported by a widespread study of the basics of Bahasa. One of the reasons is an intermittent national effort to encourage study in Asian languages in general. Prince points to the peak years for Asian languages, when Paul Keating tried to encourage Australians to accept where we are in the world. “Australia can’t bolt on the Evinrude and motor off to the coast of California,” he said in 1998.
As prime minister Kevin Rudd nominated Korean, Mandarin, Indonesian, Hindi and Japanese as priority languages for schools, although where the teachers would come from was never clear.
According to the Asian Studies Association, in 2019 there were 136 students studying Korean at Australian universities.
The Abbott government created the New Colombo Plan – it continues under Labor – that sends Australians for study, language training and internships in 40 Asian countries.
And the Coalition also created incentives to learn foreign languages. From January a full-year study load in languages will cost $4600 in student debt, compared to just under $17,000 for humanities, business and law courses.
But growing the number of Asian-language speakers starts in schools, which is not happening.
Louisa Field from the University of Sydney and colleagues analysed HSC enrolments in what NSW governments have considered for a generation to be “priority” Asian languages: Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Korea.
They report that in 1994 4.25 per cent of HSC students were studying one of them but this was down to 3.43 per cent in 2021. And there were just 111 enrolments in Higher School Certificate Indonesian language courses.
“Current trajectories predict the extinction of Indonesian from Australian universities by 2031,” they say.
At the top end of the market there are few undergraduates with the time and money to spare to spend a semester or more immersed in an Asian culture – there are certainly not enough, Prince suggests, for universities to create bespoke courses. And he warns the New Colombo Plan provides “little to no meaningful funding” for universities.
Prince argues if Foreign Affairs wants more Asia-literate Australians it should fund universities as the Department of Defence does for its own objectives. Want to learning the physics for nuclear submarines? The feds are funding university study.
But money can’t create motivation and there is decades of evidence that Australians are resolutely monolingual.
“Australia is a fiercely English-speaking nation and notions of English exceptionalism have shaped attitudes towards language learning, allowing it to become a dispensable part of students’ education,” Field writes.
Maybe it does not matter – when it comes to basic communications there are apps for that. Yong Zhao from the Melbourne Graduate School of Education argues that it takes humans so long to learn, really learn, a language, machine translation is an option.
Instead he proposes teaching competencies to understand different cultures in what are now language syllabuses.
“The real meaning of studying foreign languages should have always been about culture instead of language for the majority of students,” he says.
Which a week in Bali isn’t going to deliver.
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