Melbourne’s regional dialect

Melbourne, Australia, has more languages ??spoken than any other country in the world, with 251 voices extending to every corner of the city. In this thoroughly modern metropolis, the old European languages ??are beginning to fade and Chinese is becoming louder, especially in the inner cities.

Three adults in the city speak a language other than English when they go home. A major analysis by Fairfax Media shows that 200,000 more Melburnians speak another language than English compared with 10 years ago.

In 6% of suburbs, more than half the population speaks a language other than English at the dinner table. There are 7 such suburbs where English is not even the main language.

Arabic is the sixth most commonly spoken language in Melbourne after English, after Greek, Italian, Mandarin, Vietnamese and Cantonese.

But this is changing. From 2001 to 2011, driven by new immigrants, the number of Mandarin speakers increased from 600,000 to 1 million. Mandarin is now the second most spoken language in inner-city suburbs including the CBD and Carlton, while in affluent Glen Waverley 13 per cent of residents speak Mandarin at home.