Five years. Thousands of new neighbours.
No other kind of change reshapes a council as quickly as migration. Cairns's Malayalam-speaking community has grown by +148% since the last census. It is only one of several.
Up +148% since the last census. From 217 to 538 speakers.
Up +104% since the last census. From 323 to 658 speakers.
Up +31% since the last census. From 835 to 1,091 speakers.
122 languages carry the conversation at home. Every one of them is spoken here.
Each block below is scaled to the number of people who speak that language at home, and tinted by how fast that community has grown since the last census.
Growth this fast means services designed from the 2016 census are already out of date. This Atlas is our honest attempt to keep the picture current, for our own planning, for the agencies that partner with us, and for the families still arriving every year.
Our linguistic character changes street by street. Click through to any suburb for its own portrait: the languages spoken there, the communities calling it home.
22.0% of Cairns residents speak a language other than English at home, against 15.8% for Queensland and 27.3% nationally. Drawn from the 2021 census.