Iluminado Nical’s scientific contributions

This article examines the changing legislation and education policies towards minority languages of two multilingual countries, Australia and the Philippines. Australia’s emergence from its assimilationist past to embrace a more multicultural approach is analysed with special reference to young Cambodian - Australians’ educational achievements that show the vital importance of school support for minority language literacy in enhancing students’ subsequent professional advancement. Philippines’s transition from dependence on colonial languages is shown to have been only a partial success, with the dominance of English supplemented by the co-officiality of one of the country’s ten major indigenous languages. The downgrading of the remaining nine is examined through an analysis of empirical data from a non-Filipino speaking region, where students are invariably trilingual, but where the rural poor’s educational chances are lessened through being educated in two languages other than their home tongue. The article concludes by re-affirming the need for a supportive community milieu to be supplemented by school literacy programs in minority languages, in that one of these two factors in its own way may not be sufficient to ensure successful language maintenance. The Philippine case-study also shows how long periods of linguistic suppression can breed a degree of diffidence about the value of literacy in the home tongue, without eliminating the emotional ties of speakers to their mother tongue as the core-value of their culture.