The multilingual profile and the culturally diverse nature of Australia’s population are continuously reaffirmed through Census data which provide details on birthplace and ancestry as well as on languages used in the home and English language skills. Despite its shortcomings such as a change in the wording of the language question in 1986 (for more details, see Chapters 2 and 3), the Australian Census has provided invaluable information on community languages since the mid-1970s. This has facilitated the construction of a linguistic ecology of Australia including language maintenance and shift patterns in ethnolinguistic groups and macro-factors affecting the vitality of languages in Australia. For example, the most recent Census (2001) included 206 listings of languages other than English (LOTEs) with 142 of these being ‘community languages’ and the rest Australian indigenous languages. In 2001, 16 per cent of the population used a LOTE at home. Kipp’s analysis of the 2001 Census data on language (see Chapter 2) showed that Italian remains the most widely used community language in Australia with more than 3,50,000 users; Greek, Cantonese and Arabic follow Italian with more than 2,00,000 users; Vietnamese and Mandarin record around 1,75,000 and 1,40,000 users respectively. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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