Big Impact or No Advantage? Raciolinguistic Framings in Australian Media Coverage of Young People's Multilingualism

Abstract

This article examines Australian media coverage of childhood multilingualism and language education through 85 news articles published between 2013 and 2024 across major news outlets. Using a critical post-structural framework and raciolinguistic perspective, we demonstrate how identical linguistic practices (multilingualism and language learning) are framed through different ideological lenses depending on children's racial positioning. While White, monolingual children's language learning is consistently celebrated through neoliberal ideologies of competitive advantage and cognitive benefit, racialised children's existing multilingualism is constructed as a deficit, barrier or threat requiring intervention. These differential framings reveal systematic raciolinguistic hierarchies that privilege Whiteness while marginalising Indigenous and migrant communities’ linguistic practices. Our findings reveal how media discourses actively construct and maintain linguistic inequalities through racialised framings, demonstrating the importance of examining how language and race intersect in public discourse, with significant implications for how sociolinguistics advocates for children and young people's multilingualism in the Australian and other settler-colonial contexts.