66 per cent.
Nearly 66 in every 100 Canterbury-Bankstown residents speak a language other than English at home. It is among the highest shares of any council in New South Wales.
Arabic is spoken by 63,566 of our residents at home, 17.4% of the council.
Vietnamese is spoken by 27,861 of our residents at home, 7.6% of the council.
Mandarin is spoken by 19,027 of our residents at home, 5.2% of the council.
140 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.
We share this portrait because Canterbury-Bankstown is, genuinely, not like an "average" council. Services designed for the median New South Wales resident arrive here in the wrong language. This Atlas exists so nobody writing policy about us, federal, state, corporate or media, can claim they did not know.
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.
65.8% of Canterbury-Bankstown residents speak a language other than English at home, against 31.4% for New South Wales and 27.3% nationally. Drawn from the 2021 census.