Demographic situation

There are some 75 to 100 ‘immigrant’ or ‘community languages’ in use in Australia, the exact number depending on one's criteria for the term ‘language’. The term ‘community language’ is employed to denote the socalled ‘immigrant’ languages used within the Australian community to emphasise the legitimacy of their continuing existence. These languages have been part of the Australian scene since early in the history of white settlement. However, there has been discontinuity between the earlier and contemporary use of community languages.

The 1986 Census data provides the most detailed large-scale corpus of information on home language use. Of the Australian population 13.6 per cent reported employing a language other than English at home. (However, there are many who now use a community language not in their own but in their parents' homes). This rose to 18.5 per cent in Victoria, and was lowest in Queensland (5.9 per cent) and Tasmania (3.6 per cent), the states least affected by postwar migration. The community languages most widely used in the home were Italian (415,700 speakers), Greek (277,500), Serbo-Croatian (140,500), Chinese (139,100), Arabic (199,200), and German (111,300). Other languages with over 50,000 regular users were Dutch, French, Polish, and Spanish. With the large number of South-east Asian refugees since 1976, Vietnamese has also now joined this group of languages.