Questions of language in the commonwealth censuses

Abstract

Censuses, which governments conduct to provide information on society for the provision of better order and welfare, have frequently included questions on language. Two aspects have been the subject of enquiry. First, language as an aspect of personal identity, notably mother tongue and that spoken, was recorded. Second, as a measure of the progress in education, levels of literacy were probed. Thus, specific skills in particular languages were asked, often to monitor language loss or the promotion of official tongues. However, within the countries of the Commonwealth there has been a remarkable lack of linguistic curiosity. This feature has been apparent since the beginning of modern census taking in the 19th century and has been perpetuated into the post‐colonial era. As a result, language questions that were posed have been diverse, with little systematic approach to the information sought. Indeed, half the countries in the latest round of Commonwealth censuses asked none, while the remainder usually only included one or two issues. As a result, comparatively little is known, from the published census data, of either the linguistic allegiances and abilities of a large proportion of the inhabitants of the Commonwealth or their evolution through time. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Modern Census: Evolution, Examples and Evaluation

“…Examples such as education and housing require international cooperation to produce consistent data. In addition, languages vary substantially in their individual importance between countries (Christopher, ) and ethnicity is fraught from an academic perspective of classification (Kertzer and Arel, ). Initiatives from international organisations to improve quality and to understand comparability across cultures will become increasingly important as the assembly of population statistics becomes more of an international enterprise (McCaa et al , ), especially as individual countries are limited by constitutional restrictions on geodemographic classifications used.…”

Talking population geographies and a ‘love letter’ to the journal

“…CP: Yes, and there are of course many population geographers who understand that all those technical decisions made about, for instance, how you count population, how you decide all the spatial statistics you might deploy to understand the spatial dynamics of the population, are themselves political decisions. I think there's probably a lot of population geographers down the years who haven't really wanted to do that, they haven't really wanted to engage with that, but we've got a few interesting pieces in the journal-which could be better known-about effectively the politics of the Census, of different kinds of censuses and population recording systems, for instance controlling Australian Aborigines, and there's stuff too about the Commonwealth censuses and how they construct categories of race (e.g., Christopher, 2005Christopher, , 2011Frantzman et al, 2014;Kraly & McQuilton, 2005). Now, it's all there in the journal, but possibly people outside wouldn't think they could go there and find anything very interesting along these lines.…”

‘Home language’, ‘Main Language’ or no language: Questions and answers about British Sign Language in the 2011 British censuses

“…The same question may be asked with completely different motives and different interpretations of the results (Leeman 2018, 3). For example, questions on the use of the indigenous Celtic languages of the British Isles were added to the regional censuses in Scotland in 1881 and in Wales in 1891 at the urging of local language activists who were concerned about the loss of Scottish Gaelic and Welsh respectively (Mackinnon 1990, Christopher 2011. At the same time, it is clear that some people in authority would have seen the decline of the Celtic languages as a sign of progress (Christopher 2011, 539).…”