We are Sydney.
Home to one of the larger Mandarin-speaking communities in New South Wales, and 115 other language communities besides.
18,181 speakers, 8.8% of Sydney. -12% since 2021.
6,042 speakers, 2.9% of Sydney. -0% since 2021.
5,812 speakers, 2.8% of Sydney. -11% since 2021.
116 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 publish this so our residents can see themselves counted, and so the agencies, funders and neighbours who serve us can see who we actually serve. Language access is not a translation line-item in our budget. It is how an emergency notice reaches a grandparent, how an enrolment form is understood, and how a health campaign actually lands in the suburbs that make up our council.
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.
40.5% of Sydney 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.