Nearly a quarter of Australians speak a language other than English at home. That number is true. It is also not a brief for your website, ads or customer service.
When someone says “1 in 4 Australians speak a language other than English at home,” they are usually trying to help and the figure is real. About 5.5 million people, or 22.3% of the population, used a language other than English at home on Census night 2021, across more than 350 languages.
What it is not, is a campaign brief.
If you sell into Fairfield in western Sydney, almost 7 in 10 residents speak a multicultural language at home. The top three are Vietnamese, Arabic and Assyrian Neo-Aramaic. Cross to Casey in Melbourne’s south-east and the picture flips: Punjabi, Sinhalese and Hazaraghi, with about 4 in 10 residents speaking a language other than English at home. Strathfield sits around 66%. Cumberland around 64%. Greater Dandenong around 63%.
Same country, very different shopping lists.
Most small and mid-sized businesses still plan languages the other way around. They hear the national headline, pick Mandarin because it ranks first nationally, add Arabic because it sounds important, and call it multicultural marketing. Then the material sits unread in the catchments they actually serve, while a competitor who bothered with the council data gets the customers who prefer to buy in their own language.
National averages hide the map
You do not sell to Australia, rather you’re most likely selling to a handful of suburbs, a trade area, a set of postcodes, a clinic catchment, a school zone, a store network. Language choice, channel choice and trust get decided there.
That is why the useful question is not “What are the top 10 languages in Australia?” It is “Which languages show up in the places my customers already are?” Pull the Census figures for the local government areas you care about, take the top two or three languages, and start there. You usually need fewer languages than people expect, and they are often not the ones the national list would have you quote for.
A free way to see your catchment
We built the Australian Language Map so businesses can do that without an afternoon in ABS. It shows language spoken at home by council area across Australia. Free, no login.
You can explore your catchment here: https://lexigo.com/language-map
Once you can see the map, the commercial decisions get simpler. Which languages belong on the homepage versus a landing page. Which in-store or SMS languages are worth the production cost. Which community channels to brief. Which jobs need a proper translation quote instead of a machine pass.
Then decide how the work gets done
Language choice and supplier choice are two different decisions. Most businesses reverse them: they ring around for quotes before they know which languages matter in their trade area, and they get three numbers that look unrelated because nobody scoped the same job.
Start with the catchment then brief the work properly. If a document has to be accepted by a government department, court or university, it needs NAATI certification. If you are localising a website, product range or campaign, what matters is subject knowledge and quality control — and whether the company behind the work is accountable. NAATI now endorses language service providers at organisation level as well; that is separate from an individual translator’s credential, and it is one of the faster legitimacy checks before you pay anyone.
Why this year matters for SMEs
Census night was 11 August 2026. The ABS starts releasing 2026 language data from June 2027. Every business will see the same national headline on the same morning. The ones who benefit will already know which languages their own customers speak, and who they would call to do the work.
Research keeps showing the commercial stake: a large share of consumers prefer to buy in their own language, and a meaningful share will not buy from an English-only experience at all. Those customers are already in your catchment. They are buying from someone else until your language list matches the map.
If you want a hand planning languages for a specific area, get in touch. Or open the map, pick your LGAs, and build the brief from there.