Top 10 languages spoken in Australia

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Most Common Languages Spoken in Australia

The most common languages spoken in Australia were:

  1. English (around 72.7% of the population)
  2. Mandarin (2.5%)
  3. Arabic (1.4%)
  4. Cantonese (1.2%)
  5. Vietnamese (1.2%)
  6. Italian (1.2%)
  7. Greek (1.0%)
  8. Hindi (0.7%)
  9. Spanish (0.6%)
  10. Punjabi (0.6%)

Top 5 languages used at home, other than English, were Mandarin (2.7 per cent), Arabic (1.4 per cent), Vietnamese (1.3 per cent), Cantonese (1.2 per cent) and Punjabi (0.9 per cent) – ABS.

What are the top 10 languages spoken in the world?

  • English (1,132 million speakers)
  • Mandarin (1,117 million speakers)
  • Hindi (615 million speakers)
  • Spanish (534 million speakers)
  • French (280 million speakers)
  • Arabic (274 million speakers)
  • Bengali (265 million speakers)
  • Russian (258 million speakers)
  • Portuguese (234 million speakers)
  • Indonesian (198 million speakers)

What are the top 10 languages to learn?

  • Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world – spoken in some form by 1.2 billion people – so it only makes sense to include it on this list. Though Chinese consists of various dialects, they use the same writing system, and Mandarin is the most commonly spoken throughout China and the rest of the world.
  • Spanish almost always ranks high on the list for top languages to learn, and for very good reasons. With over 477 million native speakers and over 550 million speakers total, it is the official language of over 20 countries and the unofficial second language of the United States where about 13% of the population speaks Spanish at home.
  • Arabic is a beautiful language that is generally considered quite difficult for English-speakers to learn. Part of that is because it varies widely depending on where it’s spoken, An Arabic speaker from Lebanon may not understand a speaker from Algeria and vice versa. However, most programs will teach you Modern Standard Arabic, or MSA. This is a standardized version of the language taught in schools all over the Arab world and will help you communicate with Arabic speakers from almost any country. MSA is used in many governments, businesses, and journalistic practices globally.
  • French is considered one of the easier languages to learn for English speakers. The FSI scale ranks French as a “category I language”, considered “more similar to English” compared to categories III and IV “hard” or “super-hard languages”. According to the FSI, French is one of the easiest languages to learn for a native English speaker.
  • German might not be as familiar to English speakers as Spanish, but it’s still one of the easiest languages to learn. Like Spanish, it’s also a phonetic language, which makes pronunciation easy to figure out.
  • Japanese is spoken natively by about 128 million people, primarily by Japanese people and primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language. Japanese belongs to the Japonic or Japanese-Ryukyuan language family. The Japanese language and culture is actively promoted outside of Japan, and many international schools for Japanese living abroad so that schooling can be in a Japanese speaking environment.
  • Italian The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) considers Italian to be one of the easiest languages to learn. Indeed, it is a lot faster language for monolingual English speakers to learn than for example Russian and Chinese. Russian might take nearly twice as many classroom hours as Italian to reach the same level of fluency.
  • Portuguese is the native language of the vast majority of the people in Portugal, Brazil and São Tomé and Príncipe (95%). With over 250 million native Portuguese speakers and 24 million L2 (2nd language) speakers, it is definitely a language worth learning.
  • Hindi is the fourth most-spoken first language in the world, after Mandarin, Spanish and English. Hindi alongside Urdu as Hindustani is the third most-spoken language in the world, after Mandarin and English. As per OECD’s baseline projections, India would overtake the US to become the second largest economy in terms of size of GDP in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms by the late 2040, and Hindi’s importance and influence as one of the official languages of India will only increase. Hindi translators are also critical for reaching a large population of India, as Hindi is the most widely spoken, with 52.8 crore individuals, or 43.6% of the population, declaring it as their mother tongue.
  • Korean is the 18th most popular language globally, with over 75 million people speaking the language.
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