71 per cent.
Nearly 71 in every 100 Christmas Island residents speak a language other than English at home. It is among the highest shares of any council in Other Territories.
Malay is spoken by 317 of our residents at home, 18.9% of the council.
Mandarin is spoken by 234 of our residents at home, 14.0% of the council.
Cantonese is spoken by 58 of our residents at home, 3.5% of the council.
16 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 Christmas Island is, genuinely, not like an "average" council. Services designed for the median Other Territories 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.
71.0% of Christmas Island residents speak a language other than English at home, against the state average and 27.3% nationally. Drawn from the 2021 census.