Australia's multilingual and industrial situation

In this chapter, I will discuss the setting up of the project which is providing us with our data on verbal communication in English between immigrants of different non-English-speaking language and cultural backgrounds. Australia's ethnolinguistic diversity offers challenges and opportunities to sociolinguistic research. It is estimated that over one hundred languages are spoken on a regular basis in Melbourne, the city in which the data were gathered. According to the 1986 Census, 22.7% of the population then used a language other than English at home. This does not include the many people who employ a language other than English regularly but not in their own homes (cf. Clyne 1991).

The wide cultural diversity of the Australian population provides rich contexts for research into inter-cultural communication. In Melbourne, for instance, Croats, Sinhalese and Vietnamese, Maltese, Poles, and Chinese have co-settled and worked together. These groups – in contrast to, say, Greeks and Turks, Germans and Croats, Italians and Maltese, Chinese and Vietnamese – have had no history of interaction as groups and are unlikely to share communication patterns that they do not share with the ‘mainstream’ Australians (i.e. those of British descent and those who have assimilated into that dominant group).