Alice Qi (right) said none of the streets of Sydney couldn't hear English. (photo by Sydney Morning Herald)
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Mandarin in Sydney and Melbourne, have replaced Arab and Greek, respectively, as the most widely used community conversational language.
The number of people speaking Mandarin in Sydney rose 71 percent between 2011 and 2016, according to a new book called multilingual Sydney: city report (Multilingual Sydney: A city report).
However, one of the co-authors of the book, Alice Qi (Alice Chik, a senior lecturer in the Department of Education Studies at the University of Macquarie, said that the number of people speaking Thai at the Sydney Hay Market (Haymarket), actually exceeded the number of people speaking Putonghua and Cantonese. This makes Chinatown a de facto "Asian Street".
"(Sydney) which town is dominated by only one language ethnic group. People also tend to think that places like Chinatown or the little Italian district of (Little Italy) are dominated by a language, but this is no longer the case. "
Sydney is Australia's most spoken city, with 35.8% of its residents speaking languages other than English at home, more than 32.3% in Melbourne and 20.8% in Australia.
Mandarin speakers accounted for 4.7% of Sydney's resident population and 4.1% of Melbourne's resident population.
Mandarin, Arab, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Greek are also widely spoken in Sydney, accounting for 4 percent, 2.9 percent, 2.1 percent and 1.6 percent of the population, respectively.
By contrast, Melbourne's Greek-speaking population accounted for 2.4 percent, followed by Italy (2.3 percent) and Vietnamese (2.3 percent), followed by Cantonese (1.7 percent).
Dr. Qi says the multilingual trend is diverging from the inner city. "the most diverse urban areas are now in the southwest, west and northwest of Sydney, and there are many of them. It used to be Chinatown, and five wharf (Five Dock), Lekat (Leichhardt), now have so many. "
Regent Park (Regents Park) is one of Sydney's most multilingual districts, with only 1/4 residents speaking English, Arab (13.5%) and Cantonese (9.2%). Mandarin (8.6%) and Vietnamese (5.5%) are widely used community languages.
But Moshven (Mosman), Manley (Manly) and Mona Valley (Mona Vale) still have more than 3/4 English-only people.
Professor (Phil Benson) of Macquarie University's Department of Linguistics, another co-editor of the multilingual Sydney: city report, said the total number of Sydney speakers in 20 languages reached more than 20, 000, and another 1000 spoke 63 other languages. And the numbers will continue to grow.
Dr Qi, however, refutes the idea that English is not spoken in minority communities. "there is no street in Sydney that cannot hear English, and there are few shops," she said. Even in the most multilingual urban areas, English is widely used. "