I don’t know about that, it looks like European languages are dying pretty quickly. Some like Maltese are almost gone as first languages. I still speak French and Italian but my first language is English and the French I speak is New Caledonian, not the French of France.
View attachment 6790
Italian is the most dying language in Australia by far, with 43,556 less people indicating that Italian was their first language in the 2021 census than they did in the 2016 census. Source: Profile.id, using data from the ABS.
Not too many yet, but they’re still here. The kids being born today are quite likely fourth generation, which in a footballing sense means they can’t represent their ancestral homeland anymore unless they qualify another way under FIFA eligibility rules.
View attachment 6791
FIFA allows for second and third generation immigrants to represent their ancestral countries of origin. Despite the rules initially using masculine pronouns, FIFA eligibility rules apply to every soccer player, futsal player, parasoccer player and beach soccer player in the worlds, male and female. Source: Wikipedia via FIFA.
Of course, though culture, food and religion survive a lot longer than entire languages and dialects. Of course recipes and traditions change and Europe is becoming less Christian, so in some senses old recipes and traditions are more preserved in the diaspora (apparently some older Greek people in Melbourne and Sydney still speak a dialect of Greek not spoken in Greece anymore, while the Maltralian dialect of Maltese includes both borrowings from Aussie slang and old terms from Arabic and Italian that've been forgotten or superseded in Malta) while the diaspora are also still more religious. This is called a time freeze, because diaspora never truly forgot old traditions whilst never really learning new ones.
In saying that, the younger generations are unfortunately losing a lot of their languages due to intermarriage (this is completely fine by the way, and you can still pass on your culture and language through an intercultural marriage) and perceived practically. This is a pattern that’s starting to decrease now (as Asian languages are seemingly better preserved by their communities than European ones), but in the past CALD groups would lose their languages over time unless they were completely isolated (in the case of many Indigenous languages and the Cocos Malay language spoken on Home Island in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands).
Nice! Speaking multiple languages is an incredibly useful and valuable skill that shows a high degree of knowledge and understanding of foreign cultures and/or your own identity.
