81 per cent.
Nearly 81 in every 100 Cocos (Keeling) Islands residents speak a language other than English at home. It is among the highest shares of any council in Western Australia.
Malay is spoken by 363 of our residents at home, 61.6% of the council.
Spanish is spoken by 6 of our residents at home, 1.0% of the council.
2 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 Cocos (Keeling) Islands is, genuinely, not like an "average" council. Services designed for the median Western Australia 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.
81.2% of Cocos (Keeling) Islands residents speak a language other than English at home, against 23.5% for Western Australia and 27.3% nationally. Drawn from the 2021 census.