Anti-Racism law is unlikely to prevent yourself from educators by using the language spoken in their home to stream pupils in modern day language classes, as outlined by federal race discrimination commissioner Szoke.

Course instructors of Chinese say this streaming rule ought to be required in the event that language could be to have got a future to be a mainstream subject even so the rule was regarded at odds while using the federal Race Discrimination Act.

However, Dr Szoke said she thought a breach of the RDA extremely unlikely provided our home life language rule put on to all modern languages tutored at school and to be able to single out any particular language.

"I discover it is hard to see are able to afford because there's certainly no nexus directly to race -- it's really a way of universal language proficiency rule,'' she said.

Clumsy streaming in Victoria, in accordance to time spent inside of a Chinese-speaking country, allows pupils from Chinese speaking homes to enrol in classes for the purpose of second-language learners, as outlined by Jane Orton, director of the Chinese Teacher Training Centre together with the University of Melbourne.

Unable to contend, students from non-Chinese backgrounds leave this particular language while those from Chinese-speaking homes learn little in class, thereby undermining the discipline, Dr Orton says.

Victoria was a student in the centre of the debate because the device has far more than 60 per cent belonging to the country's Year 12 pupils of Chinese, making effective streaming of classes vital.

A year ago, more than two-thirds belonging to the almost 1000 students who fronted for Year 12 Victorian Certificate of Education exams in Chinese as being a second language were judged to work as of Chinese background and were built with a corresponding fluency.

In 2004-05, the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority revisited the qualification rules to get a subject typically known as Chinese Second Language.

The VCAA adopted a rule that limits pupils who have lived three years or more in a Chinese-speaking country or spent 12 or more months in a Chinese-language school.

"We considered the chance of using country of birth within the eligibility criteria for Chinese Second Language,'' a VCAA spokesman said.

"I thought this was challenged and our legal advice was that instantly a prima facie case that country of birth may very well be construed as finding yourself in breach associated with the Commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act. The VCAA took that advice.''

The spokesperson said the VCAA did not have any legal advice on the exact property language rule but rejected it as "too difficult to define precisely.

"It could be too not easy to obtain verifiable, comparable responses [from families] to be a basis for concluding a candidate' eligibility for Chinese 2nd Language.''

Dr Orton said the present day rules made no learning sense.

"Language teachers like myself don't want in order to country of birth or years of residency used as criteria, because which is not what makes the phenomenal, qualitative difference we tend to be about,'' she said.

"Babies do not get out much, it's language of home in which produces the difference, it can be irrelevant in which the baby was given birth to or crawled located on the floor.''

Dr Orton stresses the significantly different needs that Chinese language, with its tones and characters, makes on a learner from being a non-Chinese background.

This kind of learner has just 500 hours of classroom time in Chinese language instruction from Year seven to Year twelve.

The Foreign Service Institute in Washington DC guesses that English speakers need about 2,two hundred hours to work as proficient in Chinese in comparison with 600 hours for French, Dr Orton says.

It seems remarkable that chimps can be taught to talk. But, when you think about it, isn't it much more remarkable that you learned your 50,000 words? You didn't have a team of experts to teach you. You were just surrounded by a chattering family. It was no one else's job to teach you words. People just spoke to you when they felt like it and told you 'no' if you did something wrong. When you began to talk, everyone was delighted but no one was surprised. It's happened billions of times before. It's what babies do.

In the 1950s an American language scientist called Noam Chomsky began to point out how very surprising it is that babies learn to talk. He also suggested that there might he something special about the way we learn language. We don't seem to learn it in the way we learn to read or do arithmetic. It almost seems as though the brains of babies are programmed to learn to talk.

Chomsky and other scientists have made many detailed studies of babies learning to talk and these have supported the idea that humans are horn with the special ability to learn language. For one thing, the sound of the human voice is much more interesting to babies than any other noise.

Another thing that makes scientists believe babies are programmed to learn language is that all normal babies go through the same stages as they learn to talk. Between the ages of five and seven months, they start making noises that sound like voiced speech sounds. By eight months they are practising word sounds like ba-ba-ba, neh-neh-neh, and dee-dee-dee. Once children reach their first birthday, they are babbling out a long stream of sounds that seem to be consonants and vowels. It can sound just like speech but it's complete gibberish. Babies who are born deaf learn sign language in the same way as other babies learn to speak. At the same age that hearing babies begin to talk gibberish, deaf babies start babbling too, with their hands. If a baby is born without the ability to hear, is important that this is detected as early as possible. Then people will know that they must 'speak' to the baby in other ways. Ibis will allow the the baby to learn to talk in sign language. Just before their first birthday, babies start to understand words and, shortly after that, most begin to say them. For a while, they just say one word at a time. Then they start putting them together to say things like 'daddy do', 'see cat' or 'shoe off'.

Babies all over the world say the same sorts of thing when they speak their first tiny sentences. In different languages words are often said in a different order. Babies almost always manage to use the word order that is correct for the language they are learning.

After a while, the sentences grow to be three or four words long and then, between the age of about three and three and a half, children seem suddenly to be able to talk quite freely. They begin to put the little words like 'the', 'in', 'to' and 'has' into their sentences. This lets them say very complicated things like: 'I want to stand in the shower so Daddy won't find me'.

Children do make mistakes with their grammar. They may sometimes say 'I are' instead of 'I am' at first, but they actually make far fewer mistakes than adults learning a foreign language. Tiny children who can't put together the simplest jigsaw can put together the words to say things most older people couldn't say in a second language even if they had studied it for months.

English-speaking three year olds work out that people say 'that cow' if there is one cow and 'those cows' if there is more than one. As if by magic, they know that this works for lots of things. They say 'that tractor' and 'those hens'. No one is surprised when they make the mistake of saying 'sheeps' and -calfs' but it doesn't take long for them to work out that they should be saying those sheep and calves'. At the same time, they are learning lots of other rules of grammar. They learn to put '-ed' on the end of a word like 'walk' if they walked in the past but not to say 'goed', .sitted' and 'thinked'. Scientists have found that all children of this age suddenly pick up speech in this way whatever language they're learning. We seem to lose this ability as we become adults. This is why many people find learning a language very difficult when they are older.

Some parents believe they must correct their children's mistakes to help them learn to speak. However, scientists have compared families which try to teach their children to talk with those who don't. The studies found that all the children progressed at more or less the same rate. To learn to talk, it seems that human babies just need people to listen to and people to talk to. Even more remarkably, children seem to be able to find a way to talk to their friends, even if they don't speak the same language.

There are now about 5000 different languages spoken by the peoples of the Earth but why there are so many languages is no longer a mystery. Language is always changing. Old languages die and new ones are born. No one speaks Phrygian or the language of the Pharaohs any longer and when the story of the Tower of Babel was first told, the English language didn't exist.

About 1300 years ago, people in England were speaking a language called 'Old English'. The It looks like a foreign language, but when you say the words out loud, some do begin to sound more like modern English; 'meahte' and 'might' for example, and 'heofon' and 'heaven'.

The first two lines of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, written 600 years ago, show that the language of the people of England was gradually becoming much more like the language we speak:

Whan that April with his showres soote
the droughte of March bath perced to the mote...

New languages are born when groups of people start living apart and don't talk to each other any more. The language of each group changes in different ways until, after several hundred years of separation, the two groups find it difficult to understand each other. When English-speaking people first moved to America, they spoke as they would have done in their home country: England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland. The language of the people on both sides of the Atlantic has changed and grown more different ever since.

Its not just the accent that is different; so are some of the words and the rules people follow as they speak. A teacher in the United States might say, 'You have only gotten a D on this assignment: In England, the word 'gotten' isn't used anymore and 'assignment' is not a commonly used word. A teacher in England would be more likely to say, 'I was only able to give you a D for this piece of work:

English-speaking people around the world sometimes have trouble understanding each other, but English probably won't divide to become new languages. Modern travel and communications mean that different groups of English-speaking people are never completely separate from one another. This was not the case in times past.

The people of Europe speak many different languages because, until quite recently, travel was dangerous. A stretch of water, a mountain range, even a thick forest was enough to separate communities. Soldiers and merchants did travel, but most people stayed at home, talked only to one another and thought that people in other places spoke strangely. When famine or war meant that communities had to move or were invaded, the language was disturbed. Sometimes, the people would learn the language of the new region and their own language would die. More often, people merged their languages as they settled down together. You only have to look carefully at a language like English to see that this happens.

In the year 597 missionaries began to arrive from Rome and Ireland to teach Christianity to the English. They also taught them new words, such as 'angel', 'disciple', 'Sabbath', 'camel', 'lion', 'orange' and 'pepper', which came from Latin, Greek and Hebrew.

The Vikings invaded England several times between 750 and 1050. The language of the Viking settlers was similar to Old English and they soon learned the local language. The settlers kept some Viking words to use as well, though. Today, for example, you can 'wish' for something or you can 'want' it. 'Wish' comes from Old English and 'want' comes from the Old Norse language of the Vikings.

In 1066, William the Conqueror defeated the English King Harold at the Battle of Hastings. The new king spoke Norman French and expected everyone in England to learn his language. They didn't. A few hundred years later, even William's royal descendants were speaking English. However, by that time, Norman French words, such as 'peace', 'surrender', 'rule'. 'royal', 'grand', 'pork' and 'beef', had been absorbed into the English language.

Looking closely at the derivation, or origin of words in our language can tell us why we speak the way we do, but it may also reveal clues to a much deeper mystery - how people began to speak in the first place. Archaeologists have dug up many examples of the tools and weapons our .ancient ancestors invented, but surely their most important invention was language.

With so many different languages on Earth it could seem that language must have been invented many different times. But we know languages change, so it could be possible that all the Earth's 5000 languages have developed from just a few languages, or perhaps only one? The first clues to support this idea were discovered over 200 years ago. Sir William was convinced this was not just a coincidence. The word for 'mother' is 'matar' in Sanskrit and 'mater' in Latin.'Father' is 'pitar' in Latin and in Sanskrit and'pater'. Sir William found many other similarities.

In 1783, an Englishman called Sir William Jones went to India to be a judge. Once there he decided to learn Sanskrit, the language of an important ancient Indian civilization. Sir William already knew two other ancient languages: Lain, which was spoken at the time of the Roman Empire, and the language spoken 3000 years ago by the people of the ancient Greek civilization. While Sir William was learning Sanskrit, he found that some words were strikingly similar to those in the other ancient languages.

There are two possible reasons why languages have similar words. One is that the speakers of the languages picked up words from one another. But how could Sanskrit speakers of Ancient India have exchanged words with Lain and Greek speakers thousands of miles away on the northern shores of the Mediterranean?

The other reason seemed amazing but it was much more likely: the languages might have all developed from a single older language. It seemed reasonable that, long ago in prehistoric times, the ancestors of the people who spoke Latin and Greek both spoke the same language.

Sir William Jones's discoveries about Sanskrit suggest that even longer ago, there was a still more ancient language which had been spoken by the ancestors of Indians as well as Europeans. Just as these people were their ancestors, this language was the ancestor of a huge family of Indo-European languages. Language scholars have called this ancestor language 'Proto-Indo-European' ('Proto' is the Greek word for 'first').

If Proto-Indo-European was spoken 10,000 years ago, what languages were spoken by the people who lived even longer ago? The ancestor of the Indo-European language family must have had an even earlier ancestor. Many language scholars believe that all the world's 5000 languages may have descended from one great-greatgrandmother tongue, the language spoken by the first people who talked. As a result of Sir William's discoveries, language scholars began to think of a family tree of languages with new languages growing out like branches from older Ones. They have been able to identify other language families. Arabic and many North African and Eastern Mediterranean languages belong to the 'Afro-Asiatic' family. Hungarian and Finnish, even though they are spoken in Europe, do not seem to be closely related to other European languages. Language scholars believe they are descended from an ancient language which they have called 'Uralic'. When, how and why did humans start talking? One way to find clues is to compare ourselves with other animals.