Australia’s long-running decline in language education is being recast as something considerably bigger than an issue for schools and universities, with the Australian Academy of the Humanities establishing a national expert committee to help rebuild the country’s languages and cultural capability.
The Academy has established its Languages and Cultures Committee in response to growing concerns about declining participation in language study, increasingly fragile university programs and a shrinking pipeline of teachers, researchers and specialists.
The move comes shortly after a House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education inquiry warned of an “existential threat” to disciplines underpinning Australia’s Asia capability. The parliamentary report, Security and Prosperity in Asia: Building Asia capability in Australia through the education system and beyond, highlighted the vulnerability of language and cultural expertise at a time when Australia is seeking deeper economic, diplomatic and strategic engagement with the region.
From education issue to national capability
The Academy’s argument is straightforward: Australia cannot afford to treat languages as an optional extra in the education system when the skills they provide underpin diplomacy, defence, national security, trade and international engagement.
Academy President Professor Stephen Garton said the country had spent decades documenting the decline of languages education and now needed to focus on reversing it.
“Language capability is not an educational luxury,” he said, pointing to its importance to Australia’s international relationships and strategic interests.
There is a particularly important distinction here for the higher education sector. A university language program is not simply a collection of subjects that can be switched on and off according to short-term enrolment numbers. Once a program closes, the academic expertise, teaching capacity and institutional knowledge supporting it can disappear with it.
That makes rebuilding capability considerably harder than maintaining it in the first place.
Australia’s international education ambitions also sit awkwardly alongside this decline. The country has invested heavily in positioning itself as an internationally connected, globally engaged education destination, while simultaneously allowing some of the domestic capability required to understand the countries and cultures it wants to engage with to become increasingly fragile.
Committee looks beyond Asian languages
The new committee will be chaired by Professor Greg Hainge, Head of the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland, and brings together specialists from across languages, cultures and language education.
Importantly, its remit is broader than the immediate concern about Asia literacy.
The committee will consider languages other than English, Indigenous languages and ancient languages, while examining the broader systems required to sustain them. That includes teacher and researcher pipelines, university provision, infrastructure, pedagogy and collaboration between institutions.
That broader approach is significant. Australia’s language challenge is not simply a question of persuading more students to take Japanese, Indonesian, Mandarin or another language at school. It is about whether there is a sustainable ecosystem capable of producing teachers, researchers and highly specialised users of languages over generations.
Professor Hainge said the country needed to move from repeatedly documenting decline towards designing a sustainable system.
The Academy is particularly concerned that specialist expertise cannot simply be acquired when governments suddenly decide it is strategically important. Nor, it argues, can deep linguistic and cultural knowledge simply be automated.
That point is becoming increasingly relevant as generative AI changes the way languages are taught, translated and researched.
AI enters the language debate
One of the committee’s first initiatives will be a Community of Practice examining the use of generative AI in language education and research.
The objective is not to position AI as either a saviour or a threat, but to understand where the technology can strengthen teaching and research, where its limitations remain and what new capabilities it might require from language professionals.
That is a sensible place for the discussion to begin.
AI has already made translation and language practice considerably more accessible, but accessibility should not be confused with expertise. Being able to generate a grammatically plausible translation is not the same as understanding cultural context, historical nuance, political sensitivities or the meaning that can sit between the lines.
For Australia, particularly in areas involving diplomacy, defence, security and international relations, that distinction matters.
Rebuilding the pipeline
Perhaps the most important element of the Academy’s approach is its emphasis on the relationship between teaching and research.
The two are often discussed separately in higher education policy, but language capability makes the connection particularly obvious. Universities need researchers and academics with deep expertise to teach advanced language and cultural studies, while the education system needs to produce the next generation capable of becoming those researchers and educators.
Break the pipeline at either end and the system begins to contract.
The Academy is backing several recommendations from the parliamentary inquiry, including a stronger role for the Australian Tertiary Education Commission in identifying and sustaining areas of national capability, protections for strategically important languages within Commonwealth funding arrangements, collaborative delivery models and stronger incentives for language study across the education system.
The idea of collaborative delivery may prove particularly important for universities facing pressure to maintain specialist programs with relatively small enrolments. Rather than every institution attempting to offer the same breadth of languages independently, collaboration could allow students to access programs across institutional boundaries while preserving academic capability.
It is an approach that could potentially address one of the central tensions in modern higher education: how to maintain strategically important disciplines that may not always produce large enrolments or immediate financial returns.
The international education connection
For the international education sector, the debate also raises a bigger question about what Australia means when it talks about internationalisation.
International education is frequently framed in terms of attracting students from overseas, growing export revenue and building global partnerships. Those things remain important, but internationalisation also depends on Australians having the skills and knowledge to engage effectively with the rest of the world.
The decline of language study therefore has implications well beyond language departments.
Australia’s ability to build durable relationships throughout Asia, understand emerging markets, participate effectively in international negotiations and develop culturally informed policy ultimately depends on people with more than an English-language understanding of those societies.
The parliamentary inquiry has effectively put that issue back on the national agenda. The Academy’s new committee is now attempting to turn the warning into a longer-term response.
Whether it can succeed will depend less on another short-term initiative and more on whether governments and universities are prepared to regard languages and cultures as infrastructure rather than simply as individual academic disciplines.
Professor Garton perhaps captured the challenge most clearly when he said the question was no longer whether Australia had a problem.
“The evidence is clear,” he said. “The question now is whether we are prepared to rebuild the capability before more of it disappears.”
