Language and Education

G’day my fellow Tar Heels (and other people that may read this blog)!

During my travels I decided that on some days I was going to take a break from all the touristy stuff and walk around some the local spots to get a feel for what it’s like to live Down Under.

Lucky for me it wasn’t hard for me to communicate with any of the local people. Most people in Australia and Oceania speak English, along with their native language. In the region there are about 28 different languages, most countries list English and at least one of the native languages as countries official language. So communicating with everyone around me was not too hard, except they speak a different dialect of English than we do in the United States, it is weird sometimes.

I also found that many people in this region are immigrants from other countries, Australia and New Zealand seem to be full of immigrants from other countries. Most of these immigrants are bilingual; speaking English, thankfully, as well as the official language of the country they are from. Some of these immigrants are from Asian countries and others are from the smaller Pacific Islands in the region.

Once I got past the language barriers in the different countries, I was able to find a little bit more about the education, which I was curious about being a student for most of my life. Anyway, I found that schooling is different throughout the region, depending on which country you are from.

In larger and more developed countries, like Australia and New Zealand, it is expected that children attend school up until what we call high school and then go onto college. The average Australian or New Zealander attends school for about twenty years, pretty much how we do it in the States.

However, in other countries, education varies a little. From what I heard on the different small islands, children seem to attend school for about ten years. These countries seem to not put a lot on emphasis on education or those people attend school elsewhere.

Well I thought that you might enjoy to find out what local, everyday life can be like Down Under. Even though these countries seems like they’re worlds away, they’re not that much different than us in some ways. Crazy right?

-Gertrude


Works Cited

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/region/region_aus.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceania