Auslan (Australian Sign Language) is the language of the Deaf community of Australia and is descended from British Sign Language (BSL). Auslan and other signed languages around the world are fully-fledged languages that are visual-gestural in nature. They have a complete set of linguistic...
Overview material | Auslan
Italian belongs to the Romance family of languages and is closely connected to its ‘sibling’ languages of Spanish, Portuguese and French. It also has many commonalities and connections with English, sharing many Latin-derived words and using the same Roman...
Overview material | Italian
Turkish is the official language of the Republic of Turkey and one of the official languages of Cyprus. It originated many centuries ago in the Northern Siberian Altay Mountain Range. Nomadic people brought the language with them as they expanded out to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan...
Overview material | Turkish
Languages can be identified differently, depending on if one is taking a community or linguistic perspective. The two views are complementary, allowing understanding of different aspects of language.
From a community perspective, a language is identified with a...
Overview material | Victorian Aboriginal Languages
Hindi is an official language of India and Fiji. It is the most widely spoken language of the Indian subcontinent and is also widely spoken throughout the world in countries that include the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Mauritius, the Gulf countries and Australia.
Overview material | Hindi
Spanish is a language spoken by approximately 500 million people across the world. Spanish evolved from Latin on the Iberian Peninsula in around the ninth century, and spread from Spain to the Caribbean and to North, Central and South America as a result of the expeditions...
Overview material | Spanish
Arabic is spoken by approximately 280 million people in 22 countries over several continents. It is the official language of the Arab world, which includes countries of the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf region, and is one of the official languages of the United...
Overview material | Arabic
Modern Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus. It is spoken throughout the world – wherever there are Greek-speaking communities. One of the major characteristics of the extensive Greek Diaspora is the maintenance of the Greek language and culture...
Overview material | Modern Greek
Vietnamese is the official language of Vietnam. It is spoken by approximately 90 million people in Vietnam and approximately four million Vietnamese people living in other countries around the world, with the majority residing in the United States, Cambodia, France,...
Overview material | Vietnamese
The Classical Greek language belongs to the Indo-European linguistic family. It is thus related to most of the languages of Europe, to Old Persian and, through Sanskrit, to several major Indian languages.
Classical Greek is...
Overview material | Classical Greek
Korean is spoken by around 80 million people in the Korean Peninsula and worldwide. With the rapidly growing popularity of and interest in Korean culture across the world, the number of people learning Korean is also growing fast in many countries in Asia, Oceania, the...
Overview material | Korean
Indonesian is a standardised language that is the official language of government, education, business and the media. It has been and continues to be shaped (for example, in terms of lexicon, grammatical structures and idiomatic usage) by other languages, most significantly...
Overview material | Indonesian
German is an official language of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, Belgium, Luxembourg and in South Tyrol in Italy. It is also used as an official regional or auxiliary language in a number of other countries in Europe, and in Namibia in Africa. As one of...
Overview material | German
Japanese is the official language of Japan, a nation of islands located in the East Asia region. The Japanese language is also widely used by communities of speakers in Hawaii, Peru and Brazil, and learnt as an additional language by large numbers of students in the Republic...
Overview material | Japanese
The study of Latin allows students to enter and explore ancient worlds that have shaped contemporary life and societies. Authentic engagement with seminal works of great literature and antiquities gives direct access to ancient ways of living in and viewing the world, and an appreciation...
Overview material | Latin
Latin developed from a local dialect of central Italy to become the official language of ancient Rome, transmitting Roman law, government, literature and social and cultural knowledge and values throughout much of Europe, North Africa...
Overview material | Latin
The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority has developed a curriculum for Non-Roman Alphabet languages which will allow these languages to be offered by a Victorian school where there is no specific curriculum available.
Understanding the diverse language...
Overview material | Non-Roman Alphabet Languages
The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority has developed a curriculum for Roman Alphabet languages which will allow these languages to be offered by a Victorian school where there is no specific curriculum available.
Understanding the diverse language backgrounds...
Overview material | Roman Alphabet Languages
French is an Indo-European language and belongs to the family of Romance languages derived from the spoken Latin language of the Roman Empire. It is closely related to English, due to the shared influence of Latin and to the fact that French was the official language of...
Overview material | French
China's official language is Modern Standard Chinese, or Putonghua (the common or shared language) in Chinese. The language is also referred to as Hanyu, the spoken language of the Han people, or Zhongwen, the written language of China. In Taiwan it is more usually called...
Overview material | Chinese
