The Languages of Sydney

Small Multiples has used the Language Spoken at Home (LANP) data from the 2016 Australian census to map the languages spoken in Sydney and Melbourne. The languages we speak in Sydney and Melbourne includes two interactive dot maps (one for each city) which show the languages spoken at home by those cities' residents.

The individual dots on both maps represent 5 people. The colors of the dots show the language spoken. If you zoom in on a neighborhood you can get a good overview of the density of different language speakers in the area.


Back in 2014 the Sydney Morning Herald also created an interesting mapped analysis of the languages spoken in Sydney. The map shows the top non-English languages spoken in each of the city's suburbs, the density of English as a first language and the linguistic diversity in each neighborhood, based on data from the 2011 census.

Sydney's Melting Pot of Language reveals that east Asians predominantly live in the north shore while Arabic speakers dominate the western suburbs. Over 250 different languages are spoken in the city and nearly 40 percent speak a non-English language as their first tongue.

Accompanying the mapped visualization is a bar graph showing the numbers of speakers of each of the non-English languages spoken in the city. The graph groups the languages into global regions but you can select any of the region bars to view a percentage breakdown of the individual languages.