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It must be acknowledged that language is a national asset. It is also important to recognise that languages other than English are a national asset to Australia. Capitalising on this asset is critical to achieving national objectives with respect to improvements in trade, career pathways, international mobility, research capacity, technological developments, and community and international understanding both at the national and individual levels of engagement. Mandarin Chinese is the national language and lingua franca of China, one of Australia’s most important trading partners, and boasts more native speakers than any other language in the world (over 1.3 billion; China Statistical Yearbook, 2009). Many hundreds of thousands of Chinese have migrated to North America and to English-speaking countries elsewhere; approximately 310,000 Australian residents were born in China (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2009a). Mandarin and English are the two most spoken languages of the world, with 1.65 billion speakers between them, or around 24% of the world population of 6.9 billion (Central Intelligence Agency, 2011). Chinese is becoming one of the largest community and strategic languages in the United States—and in Australia, according to the most recent census data (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006), there are around 549,000 Chinese speakers (about 2.5% of the total population). Of these, some 100,000 are children under 14 years old who speak Mandarin Chinese or Cantonese or both. About 60% of the Chinese-born population speak Mandarin at home, whereas 29% speak Cantonese and 4% speak English. Nine out of 10 Australian-born children of Chinese-born parent(s) also speak a Chinese language at home (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2009b).
The late Professor Michael Clyne, in his pioneering research in Australia beginning in the late 1960s (particularly Clyne, 2003), made a significant and continuous scholarly contribution to the renewal of international interest in bilingualism and multilingualism (e.g., Clyne, 1967, 1972, 1987, 1991, 2005). Despite the worldwide prevalence of bilingual phenomena, however, very little is known about bilingual development involving Mandarin and English because most language acquisition research has been Eurocentric.