Languages of Australia - Other Minority Languages

Other Minority Languages

Collection districts in Sydney, Australia, denoting languages other than English most spoken at home according to the 2006 Census, including Chinese (red), Arabic (dark green), Turkish (brown), Italian (light green), Vietnamese (yellow), Greek (light blue) and Maltese (pink) Many new languages have been brought to Australia by immigrants.

In the 2001 census, 2,843,851 Australians reported speaking a language other than English at home, including 50,978 speakers of Indigenous languages. Other languages were:

Chinese (all): 371,357
Other or unspecified: 363,062
Italian: 316,890
Vietnamese: 278,236
Greek: 252,220
Cantonese: 244,553
Arabic: 243,662
Mandarin: 220,601
Serbian: 95,365 (2006)
French: 93,593
Spanish: 78,878
German: 76,443
Macedonian: 67,836
Croatian: 63,611
Polish: 53,387
Turkish: 50,693
Hindi: 47,817
Maltese: 41,393
Netherlandic: 40,188
Tagalog (Filipino): 39,643
Korean: 39,529
Indonesian: 38,724
Other Chinese: 36,764
Russian: 36,501
Japanese: 35,111
Persian: 25,238
Hungarian: 24,485
Tamil: 24,074
Portuguese: 23,688
Samoan: 22,711
Sinhalese: 20,600
Unspecified South Slavic: 14,606

Other languages spoken in Australia, according to Ethnologue, include Adyghe, Afrikaans (12,655 speakers), Basque, Western Cham, Estonian, Scottish Gaelic, Fijian Hindustani, Hebrew, Indo-Portuguese, Northern Kurdish (11,000 speakers), Cham, Latvian (25,000 speakers), Lithuanian (10,000 speakers), Cocos Islands Malay, Mambae, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic (30,000 speakers), Chaldean Neo-Aramaic, Nung, Piemontese, Pukapuka (140 speakers), Romanian, Traveller Scottish, Senaya, Slovene, Sylheti, Tai Dam, Tongan, Turoyo (2,000 speakers), Unserdeutsch, Uyghur, Northern Uzbek, and Eastern Yiddish.

Read more about this topic:  Languages Of Australia

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