Illustration by Kim Lam
Growing up Bilingual in Australia is a podcast series that follows the lives and experiences of Vietnamese families wanting to maintain their heritage language and culture within Australia’s monolingual mindset. Growing up Bilingual in Australia is a series hosted in Vietnamese and English and is produced by ViệtSpeak in collaboration with Vietnamese Australian artists.
In our two-episode pilot, host Chi Vu speaks with Vietnamese families in Melbourne’s western suburbs. We explore how it feels to be bilingual in Australia. We hear what motivates children, parents and grandparents to learn and maintain a language that is rooted in their identity. We also learn of the efforts to pass on a language that is one of the most spoken at home in Australia but not commonly taught in schools.