The majority of Australians speak English as a first or other language, however a significant number of people also speak languages other than English. About 76% of Australians reported speaking only English at home in the 2021 Census.
Mandarin is the second most spoken language in Australia, according to the latest 2021 consensus. At least 2.5% of Australians, or 596,703 people, use Mandarin as their primary language at home, making it the most frequently language spoken in the country after English.
Collectively, Cantonese and Mandarin are the most commonly spoken languages other than English in Australia (over 600,000 speakers), followed by Italian, Arabic and Greek.
Dominant groups
The major difference between the languages used at home for the population of Australia and Greater Capital Cities in 2021 was: A smaller percentage using Mandarin at home (2.7% compared to 3.8%)
If you've heard of one Chinese language, there's a pretty good chance it's this one. The most widely spoken form of Chinese is without a doubt Mandarin. With over 1.1 billion speakers in China alone, it should come as no surprise that it is also the most spoken language worldwide.
In 2023, there were around 1.5 billion people worldwide who spoke English either natively or as a second language, slightly more than the 1.1 billion Mandarin Chinese speakers at the time of survey.
The most common verbal greeting is a simple “Hey”, “Hello”, or “Hi”. Some people may use Australian slang and say “G'day” or “G'day mate”. However, this is less common in cities. Many Australians greet by saying “Hey, how are you?”.
Australian English is most similar to British English in spelling and sentence construction, although its accent and vocabulary are very distinct from the UK.
Australia was colonised two centuries later, which explains why the accent of Australian English is more similar to British English compared to American English.
The majority of Australians speak English as a first or other language, however a significant number of people also speak languages other than English.
The research suggests Proto-Australian was spoken prior to the first ice age, and that the current Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages spoken throughout the country developed and spread only 12,000 years ago.
English: Top languages taught in schools in Australia: Japanese (日本語) French (Langue Française) German (Deutsche Sprache)
In the 2021 census, the most commonly nominated individual ancestries as a proportion of the total population were: English (33%) Australian (29.9%) Irish (9.5%)
Mandarin (1,118 million speakers)
However, it's the most spoken language in the world if you count only first-language (native) speakers due to China's significant population. Mandarin is not actually a language, but a set of dialects of the Chinese language.
Today, Cantonese is the fourth-most spoken language in Australia after Mandarin, Arabic and Vietnamese.
In Australia, Australian/British spelling is preferred. The letter 's' is used, rather than the letter 'z' (American spelling).
Generally speaking though, it can be said that the Welsh accent is probably closest to an Australian one. This is due to their similarities in terms of pronunciation and vocabulary choices – both Welsh and Australians tend to end words on a 'v' sound rather than an 'r' sound like other English speakers do.
While some Australian speakers would pronounce “no” as a diphthong, starting on “oh” as in dog and ending on “oo” as in put, others begin with an unstressed “a” (the sound at the end of the word “sofa”), then move to the “oh” and then “oo”.
Certainly if you're in the US, your mother is your “mom” – short for “mommy” and in the UK, Australia and New Zealand it's “mum” – shortened from “mummy”.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
As we've already mentioned, Japanese is considered the fastest language in the world. It is always mentioned as the first on the list. So, here are 6 of the fastest spoken languages in the world, based on the average number of syllables spoken per second (SPS): Japanese - 7.84 SPS.