Introduction

There are almost 320,000 Greek-speaking Australians settled in all States, 150,604 of whom were born in Greece (ABS 1981 Census; Price, 1984; see also table 17.1). Even though traditionally there has been a high regard for the classical era of Greek culture, up until the 1960s most Australians (and even Hellenists) had little appreciation for the language and culture of modern Greece. Immigration intake policies of the 1950s, settlement patterns of Greek migrants and government policies towards ethnic communities, especially during the Whitlam era, all helped to reverse attitudes of suspicion, prejudice and animosity experienced by prewar Greek settlers.

Bilingualism within the Greek community in Australia

The 1986 Census confirmed that Modern Greek (MG) is still the most widely-used community language in Australia after Italian (see table 17.1). As Clyne (1982) attests, community languages have suffered substantial losses within their respective communities. However, Greek-born claimants showed the strongest language maintenance in Australia: 98 per cent of overseas-born Greek Australians claimed to use MG regularly, while 19.7 per cent (the largest proportion in Australia) claimed not to use English regularly. The self-report data in Tamis (1985a, 1986) suggests that 64 per cent of Greek—Australians used MG as their main language, 34 per cent spoke both MG and English depending on the occasion, and 4 per cent used English almost exclusively.