Tertiary teaching of foreign languages should focus on producing the requisite number of deeply skilled experts rather than trying to turn Australia into a nation of polyglots, a university group has argued.

The Australian Technology Network (ATN) says concerns about declining Asian literacy standards are overstated, partly because demographic change has succeeded where education has failed, and partly because artificial intelligence has reduced the need for “transactional” linguistic proficiency.

In a submission to the federal parliament’s , ATN says universities must continue to train Asia specialists to meet Australia’s economic, diplomatic and national security needs. But they must do it by pooling resources, working strategically and harnessing the abilities of the country’s vast Asian diaspora.

Executive director Kent Anderson said Australia had changed dramatically since 1990s prime minister Paul Keating reframed the country’s identity as part of the Asia-Pacific rather than the Anglosphere, just two decades after the White Australia policy’s demise.

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Australians now have a comfortable – if “superficial” – familiarity with the continent to their north, said Anderson, a former professor of Japanese and president of the Asian Studies Association of Australia.

“Australians aren’t afraid of Asia,” he said. “They travel mostly to Asia. They watch anime; they read manga; they listen to K-pop. Twenty per cent of Australians are now ethnically Asian. That is phenomenal when you think about society-level cultural change, and we should celebrate it rather than beat ourselves up for not being better.”

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Other submissions to the inquiry are less upbeat. The Australia-Indonesia Centre warned of a “vicious cycle” where declining student interest led to fewer teachers, ultimately reducing the number of programmes. The Intensive Chinese Network said “non-background” students were discouraged from taking higher school Mandarin programmes “due to competition with Chinese heritage speakers”.

The University of Tasmania predicted “the potential extinction of formal Asian language education” in the island state. Universities Australia said enrolments in Asian language degrees had declined 43 per cent since 2016, even though the 2021 Job-ready Graduates reforms had cut fees for foreign languages by 42 per cent. It blamed the “declining pipeline” of secondary school language enrolments, now languishing at less than 8 per cent.

Anderson said that although Australia’s Asia policy to date had “not delivered what it promised”, demographic change had been substantial. “We’ve got lots of people that speak Chinese. We just don’t count them because they haven’t come through the school system. We’ve got this diaspora. Let’s leverage the diaspora.”

The ATN submission says exposure to Asian tongues could be boosted by reforming teacher accreditation to allow heritage speakers – particularly of languages such as Mandarin, Hindi, Vietnamese and Tagalog, all widely spoken in the Australian community – to work as specialist language instructors in schools.

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But university-level programmes should stop “emulating the Scandinavian model of universal English fluency”, the submission says. Australia should instead establish a “coordinating hub” to help universities pool their expertise and resources and “jointly teach Asian language courses which are otherwise difficult to deliver sustainably”.

Such an approach could be modelled on the of the US, where linguistic capability is corralled in 16 institutions, many focused on “less commonly taught languages”. Duke University’s centre specialises in 40 Slavic and Eurasian languages. California State University, Fullerton, hosts expertise in Chinese, Japanese, Khmer, Korean and Vietnamese. Indiana University focuses on central Asian idioms including Kazakh, Mongolian, Pashto, Uyghur and Uzbek.

Anderson said such an approach could generate the resources to foster deep Australian expertise in five “strategic languages”: Indonesian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Hindi. “You can’t be fluent in every culture,” he said. “You have to make some strategic choices.

“We don’t need 40 universities teaching Hindi, but we need one place that really is committed to it.”

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He said funding priority should go to programmes that gave students deep linguistic expertise rather than a working knowledge of several languages. The emergence of AI-assisted translation tools necessitated a “rethink” of language teaching aims. “Where general proficiency was once the goal, AI now handles many transactional needs,” ATN’s submission says.

Anderson said AI was a “game changer” and educational policy needed to acknowledge this. He said he had fluent Japanese and “very basic” Korean, Indonesian and Chinese, “but when I travel to Vietnam, Thailand and even Korea, Indonesia and China, I use AI translation and get by.

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“That is the reality. You can try to hide that from a surly teenager by telling him ‘language learning is good for you’ but it just won’t work.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com