Language maintenance and shift in the Danish community in Melbourne

This article focuses on the level of maintenance of Danish in the Danish community of Melbourne and is based on 34 case studies drawn from a total of 89 interviews with people of Danish ethnic background carried out by Professor Bent Søndergaard in 1994. The informants fall roughly into four groups, the oldest consisting of people who migrated to Australia after the Second World War, and the youngest arriving in Australia in the late 1980s. The results indicate that the tendency to shift to English is more strongly pronounced among the earlier arrivals, while the more recent ones often report a strong wish to maintain Danish as the home language and transmit it to their children. However, the results also demonstrate considerable individual variation within generations, both with regard to the informants' linguistic goals and the actual outcomes.