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Dec.26/04 - Jan.2, 2005 |
3 - From language of shame to one of pride
Italian rises from a forbidden lingua in Australia to the second-most spoken in the country
By Antonio Maglio
Originally Published: 2002-12-15
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Nevin Pecorelli and Carlo Cohen
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Nowadays Italian is the second language in Australia, after English and before Greek and Chinese. But up to 40 years ago it was non-existent: public use of a foreigner's language was forbidden, and yet there were neither interpreters in the offices nor English-language courses. This was just one of the many forms of hostility enacted by White Australia as a defense against the "intruders", i.e. the immigrants. Since most of these immigrants came from Italy, the Italian language was only taught and learned at home. Not much, but the "bugs", as Italians were kindly labeled, had to content themselves.
The turning point arrived in the mid-Sixties, when the most enlightened Australian politicians began to consider the immigrants as a resource. Multiculturalism was still inconceivable (it would only come in the late Seventies), and the idea was assimilation, a rough concept but still much better than the furious refusal that White Australia reserved to people who were helping it come out of its economic and cultural isolation.
In 1968, Joe Abiuso (Senior Master of Modern Languages at Brunswick High School and Senior Assistant Co-ordinator of Modern Languages at Fitzroy High School) published his first book on the teaching of Italian, Enjoy Italian.
"It was an immediate success," says linguist Nevin Pecorelli who taught Italian in a school in Wangaratta, Victoria, "reprinted in 1971 and 1974. That textbook marked the boundary between intolerance against Italians and acceptance. In the early Eighties the study of Italian was officially introduced in the school curriculum. That's when the problems began."
What do you mean?
"Many people thought that the introduction of Italian in the curriculum was an initiative taken for social integration rather than cultural purposes: a sort of bone thrown to people who were anyway going to become a part of the Anglo-Saxon mainstream. There were also objective difficulties in teaching: while TV had completed the process of linguistic unification of Italy, in Australia we were still far from it. The linguistic background of most of those who had arrived from the Fifties onwards was mostly their dialect; teaching Italian to them or their children was akin to teaching them another foreign language."
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