Nearly a third of Australians were born overseas, and 23% speak a language other than English at home. Yet language learning in Australian schools has dropped dramatically - from 40% of Year 12 students graduating with a second language in the 1960s to just 8% in 2022.
University of Queensland linguistics Professor Felicity Meakins, who has spent two decades documenting Indigenous languages, warns that we're facing a critical moment for language preservation. Her research shows that maintaining native languages isn't just about communication - it's tied to improved health and wellbeing outcomes in communities.
"Connecting with language and other parts of your culture really does strengthen a person's identity," says Meakins.
As Cantonese fades from Australia's educational landscape and other community languages face similar challenges, experts like Meakins argue that relying on machine translation isn't enough. The loss of languages means losing "repositories of cultural traditions and ways of seeing the world" - a decline that could see 90% of the world's languages disappear within a century.
