73 per cent.
Nearly 73 in every 100 Cumberland 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 33,215 of our residents at home, 14.3% of the council.
Mandarin is spoken by 15,730 of our residents at home, 6.8% of the council.
Nepali is spoken by 10,257 of our residents at home, 4.4% of the council.
128 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 Cumberland 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.
73.0% of Cumberland 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.