Child at annual Mongolian Festival (Naadam) in Sydney (Image credit: What’s On)
Maintaining their heritage language is paramount for migrants internationally as language is not just a communication tool. It carries our culture, tradition, beliefs and identity. Therefore, passing our language on to our descendants is a crucial responsibility.
Living up to that responsibility can be difficult in countries such as Australia, where a monolingual mindset prevails. Small languages of emergent communities, such as Mongolian, face particular challenges.
The Mongolian language
There are 8.4 million Mongolian speakers in the world. Only 3.4 million of them live in Mongolia. A larger number of 4.1 million Mongolian speakers live in Inner Mongolia.
You might wonder what the difference between Mongolia and Inner Mongolia is. Mongolia is an independent country located between China and Russia, while neighboring Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region within China. These contiguous heartlands of the Mongolians were separated in the course of the 20th century.
The separation had linguistic consequences, too: in Mongolia, Mongolian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet but in Inner Mongolia the traditional Mongolian script is still in use.
SBS hosts a Mongolian channel
Mongolian in Australia
The separation also has consequences in the diaspora: only Mongolians from Mongolia are captured in statistics, but the number of Mongolians from Inner Mongolia are not captured, as they are Chinese nationals.
According to the Embassy of Mongolia, approximately 25,000 citizens of Mongolia currently live in Australia. I am one of them.
In addition to being an immigrant from Mongolia, I am also the mother of a 3-year-old boy.
Despite my commitment to raising him bilingually, my son is currently English-dominant, and the same is true of my nephew, and other children in my social circle.
The perspective of Mongolian migrant mothers
To find out more, and motivated by a study of parents’ emotional investment into their children’s heritage language learning, I interviewed five migrant mothers from Mongolia about their children’s proficiency in English and Mongolian. Between them, the five mothers had ten children, who have been living in Australia for 6 months to 6 years.
This is what I found:
- Preschool children regularly mix English and Mongolian, and, by and large, do not distinguish between English and Mongolian words.
- Primary school children are all English-dominant. This is particularly true when it comes to reading and writing. All six children in this age group read and write English well, but only two of them had any literacy at all in Mongolian.
- As children grow older, their oral proficiency in Mongolian declines. They only speak Mongolian to their parents, they hesitate and search for words, and some have completely lost their productive abilities.
- The only fluent Mongolian speaker among the children is a 5-year-old recent arrival, who is quickly learning English and seems to be in the process of transitioning to English dominance since starting childcare a few months ago.
Children in traditional costume at annual Mongolian Festival (Naadam) in Sydney (Image credit: What’s On)
Although this was a small-scale informal study, the trend is clear: second-generation Mongolians in Australia are not developing their Mongolian. In fact, they are rapidly losing it once they enter formal schooling.
How can we preserve Mongolian in the second generation?
Research suggests that there are many things migrant parents can do to support the bilingual development and heritage language maintenance of their children, such as sending children to bilingual schools, attending community schools, speaking only the heritage language at home, or engaging in heritage language literacy practices, such as joint book reading or use of social media with family back home.
These are all great strategies. But they are extra difficult for speakers of small, under-resourced languages such as Mongolian. For instance, there is only one Mongolian community language school at preschool and primary level available in NSW and the community languages directory of the State Library of NSW does not hold a single entry in Mongolian.
While the need to maintain Mongolian into the next generation is keenly felt in our community, the path to achieving this goal is less clear. To preserve Mongolian, we need to find new ways to support our next generation to acquire it.
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In my start-up in Adelaide’s CBD this septuagenarian teacher of languages still slogs away in an effort to keep the wolf from the door. I hope I meet Undarmaa before I shuffle off this mortal coil, or the plenitude of my decrepitude debilitates dis Desailly, if only to compare and contrast unforgettable pedagogical experiences in Huhehot and Ulan Bator. Gifting Uradyn’s book won’t be wasted. Thanks! Along with several photos of my none too handsome visage taken by friends under a gargantuan Genghis Khan statue, I acquired, and have retained, from a couple of decades ago a major article in ‘China Daily’ on the various scripts used in the territories once ruled in the Great Yuan. On a personal note, our oldest son, born in Beijing Military Hospital, and now at Adelaide Uni (Eddie), arrived in Australia 16 years ago speaking only Mandarin. So dominant is the language of Shakespeare here, and so myopic the mindset surrounding whatever imperial-hegemonic culture is foisted on to the masses – over and over in the history of the world – that he too has chosen a monolingual life. It’s the bane of my life which countless immigrants since 1788 have also endured. I remember a time here in the 1950s when Anglo Aussies en masse derided and disdained Greek and Italian to name just two famously eminent cultures. It takes a holistic approach to overcome prejudice and an entire village, from year one in a kid’s life, to make bilingualism real, except of course in the relatively rare examples evident in professional linguistic circles. And so, the only cure, is a universally agreed upon international auxlang taught in every school in the world.