By Jane Tran, Sunshine North
Our language is more than words. It is our culture, our identity, our connection to one another, and we must make sure the next generation has the opportunity to inherit it.
I grew up in a Chinese Vietnamese family, where I had the privilege of speaking Chinese at home while attending Vietnamese schools. From an early age, I experienced the power of learning and living across languages and cultures. My education continued to open those doors.
At Ho Chi Minh Open University in Vietnam, I enrolled in an American-based program where English was the primary language of instruction and French was a compulsory second language. As a result, I grew up speaking Vietnamese, Chinese, English and French.
When I came to Australia in 2000 to pursue my Master’s degree at Monash University, French was not widely spoken in my everyday life here. I gradually lost my fluency. I experienced something that many multilingual people know all too well: a language can slowly disappear when we no longer have opportunities to use it. It taught me an important lesson, languages survive when families, schools and communities actively create opportunities to learn, use, and pass them on.
That is why Vietnamese bilingual education matters.
Today, I live in Melbourne’s West, home to one of Victoria’s largest Vietnamese communities. Walk through the area and you will hear Vietnamese everywhere — at the markets, in shops, restaurants and hair salons. Vietnamese is not simply a heritage language here. It is a living language at the heart of our community.
For many years, Footscray Primary School offered a bilingual Vietnamese program. Sadly, that program was discontinued in 2020. Today, despite Vietnamese remaining the most widely spoken language after English in Melbourne’s West, there is no Vietnamese bilingual primary school program in the area. The only current bilingual Vietnamese early-learning opportunities are offered at Cherry Crescent Preschool and Albanvale Community Kinder.
This needs to change.
Over the past six years, a group of passionate Vietnamese community representatives at ViệtSpeak – Multilingual Advocacy have worked tirelessly to rebuild support for Vietnamese bilingual education. Together, we have helped establish bilingual kindergarten, brought families, teachers and community leaders together, and developed a proposal for the Education Department outlining a pathway to re-establish a well-resourced and sustainable Vietnamese bilingual primary school program. And we are making progress.
Hundreds of people have already joined us in calling for Vietnamese bilingual primary education to return to Melbourne’s West. But we need more people to stand with us.
This campaign is about much more than teaching children another language. It is about giving Vietnamese-Australian children the opportunity to learn in both languages, stay connected to their families, understand their heritage and confidently carry their culture into the future. It is about ensuring that the language spoken by grandparents can also be spoken by grandchildren. It is about recognising Vietnamese as an important part of the linguistic and cultural fabric of Melbourne and of Australia. And it is about making sure that children growing up in Melbourne’s West don’t have to choose between their heritage and their education — they can have both.
Now is the time to act. If you believe Vietnamese bilingual education belongs in Melbourne’s West:
- Add your voice to the campaign.
- Share this message with your family, friends and community.
- Talk to your local school, teachers and community leaders.
- Encourage decision-makers to support the return of Vietnamese bilingual primary education.
- Help us build a strong, united community voice for our children and future generations.
- We have already shown what our community can achieve when we work together. Now we need to take the next step.
Let’s bring Vietnamese bilingual education back to Melbourne’s West — and give the next generation the opportunity we were fortunate enough to have.
Our language. Our culture. Our community. Our children’s future. Let’s make it happen.
