Trends in the shift from community languages: insights from the 2001 census

Analysis of language data from the 2001 Census reveals an increasing shift to the sole use of English in the home for most, but not all, of Australia’s community language groups. The ageing of post-war language communities is having an escalating effect on language-shift rates for these groups; and language shift rates are significantly higher for communities and families outside the capital cities. Intra-group diversity is highlighted by the differential in language shift according to religious affiliation among those born in Lebanon, Egypt, India and Sri Lanka. While the reintroduction in the 2001 census of an ancestry question has enabled the closer identification of groups such as the Viet Nam-born (of both Chinese and Vietnamese ancestry), the removal of a question eliciting the birthplace of parents has made it impossible to provide an estimate of language shift in the second generation that is comparable to the first generation data or that is comparable to work on previous censuses