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Australia is a multicultural society in which over 300 different indigenous and migrant languages are spoken. While its cultural diversity is often celebrated, Australia’s linguistic diversity is still at risk due to the inherent monolingual mindset (cf. Clyne 2005) of its population. In this paper, we use a cross-disciplinary approach, drawing on both historical and sociolinguistic sources, to investigate some of the major causes of language shift among first- and subsequent generations of post-war German-speaking migrants in Australia. While historical and societal changes have provided greater opportunities for German to be maintained as a heritage language in Australia, these developments may have come too late or have not been effective in the face of English as the dominant language in Australia and as a global language. Our investigation indicates that Australians with German as a heritage language, like many other migrant groups, are still at a high risk of shift to English, despite recent opportunities for language maintenance provided by modern society.

During Late Antiquity, the secondary importance of women compared to men was manifest through attitudes to their spiritual prowess; it was assumed that a characteristic of the female was an absence of potential asceticism except in exceptional circumstances. Monastic asceticism at the period was dominated by male participants; there were cultural anxieties about 'womanish men', meaning that iconic representations of gender and spirituality are complex and informed by both secular and religious practices. In order to perform asceticism, some women dressed as men. This transvesticism did not simply guarantee acceptance, and some interpretations of church teachings asserted that true holiness predated a division between gender. Virginity was greatly valued. The metaphorical adorning of the soul rather than the body became a means to performing asceticism.

This article examines the evolution of contraband to legitimate trade in the eighteenth century Caribbean world during the War of Jenkins’ Ear and Seven Years’ War. It focuses on the informal networks of the British South Sea Company and the trade of informal actors. The article explores how British legislators shifted Jamaican and Dominican colonial economies away from contraband trade by opening free ports in 1766. The British Parliament passed the Free Port Act of Jamaica and Dominica following Danish and Dutch colonial efforts to crack down on contraband trade in the Caribbean world. This transition from contraband to legitimate trade enabled British merchants to engage in free trade by importing and exporting an assortment of commodities and enslaved people to and from Jamaica to other colonies in the Caribbean world.

Beginning in 1789 and escalating in intensity into at least 1793, a new temporal schema took shape in which revolutionary time pulverized the foundations of the old order. Revolution came to mean rejecting the past, introducing a sense of rupture in secular time, maximizing and elongating the present in order to turn it into a moment of personal and collective transformation, and shaping the future in accordance with the discoveries made in the present. Time ceased being a given. It became a medium of endless potential for change that could be willed, that is, enacted by conscious choice.