Rediff

Jun 28: Mandarin and Hindi are the two fastest growing languages in Australia with the country experiencing a significant growth in the population of Indian and Chinese-born people.

The 2006 census results, released on Wednesday, shows a significant increases in the number of people born in India and China living in Australia, with commensurate rise in the number of those who speak the languages of each country.

Cantonese, in fact, is mounting a challenge to the traditional language groups established by Australia's postwar Italian and Greek migrants.

With Arabic, it ties third for the most common language other than English spoken at home. But when combined with the increasing numbers of Mandarin speakers, Chinese dialects outstrip them all, The Age reported.

Chinese languages are spoken by more than 500,000 people, which has seen an increase of nearly 100,000 since the 2001 census as compared to Italian (317,893) and Greek (252,222), which have both been in decline since 1996.

Mandarin and Hindi experienced the greatest proportional growth of all languages, which has more than doubled since 1996. The reason being, there are now more than 147,000 Indian-born people living in Australia as compared to more than 77,000 in 1996, the report said.

But the dominant cultural paradigm remains with those of European descent -- British, Italian and German -- which are still the key non-Australian ancestries, the report said.

"The mainstream (in Australia) is this sort of British-Australian Christian. However, it's getting down to about two-thirds of the population," James Jupp of Australian National University's said.

"The mainstream is not the huge river that it was before the World War II -- that'll never come back," Jupp added.

The result also showed that a large number of migrants, who have arrived recently in Australia, were born in countries affected by war and political unrest.

More than 73 per cent of Australia's modest Sudanese population arrived in 2001 or later, as did at least 34 per cent of those born in Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and Iraq.