Zhang Lubei, Tsung Linda, Qi Xian
School of foreign languages, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China.
School of languages and cultures, the University of Sydney, Darlington, NSW, Australia.
Front Psychol. 2023 Feb 9;14:1096147. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1096147. eCollection 2023.
The 25 million Australians today are identified with more than 300 ancestries. People's home language use and shift patterns had demonstrated great variations as more immigrants from Asia-Pacific regions entered Australia. The ethnolinguistic composition of Australia's population had undergone substantial changes in the last few decades. Based on the statistics from Australian censuses, the present paper aims to analyze the changes of people's home language use and the shift patterns in the new Millennium. Five sets of census data released by Australian Bureau of Statistics were adopted as the secondary data source and descriptive analysis was conducted to disclose the dynamic picture of different home languages in Australia after 2000. The results suggest that the number of home language speakers in Australia has soared up quickly in the last two decades and great variations have been found between the traditional European migrant groups and the newly Asian arrivers. Mandarin has overtaken Italian and Greek to become the most populous home language other than English used in Australia since 2011 and great regional differences were also found to exist among different states and territories. Moreover, the ranking order of different home language speakers had changed considerably as compared with that in the last century. The language shift rates of different language communities and their cross-tabulations with generations, gender, age, and duration of residence in the latest available censuses after 2000 also revealed diverse developmental directions. The findings give us a glimpse of the current status of different home languages in Australia and help us to identify the potential factors impacting the shifting trends of different language communities. A better understanding of the language needs of different migrant communities may further help policymakers set more effective plans to accommodate an increasingly diverse Australian society.
如今，2500万澳大利亚人有着300多个不同的祖籍。随着越来越多来自亚太地区的移民进入澳大利亚，人们的母语使用情况和语言转换模式呈现出巨大差异。在过去几十年里，澳大利亚人口的民族语言构成发生了重大变化。基于澳大利亚人口普查的统计数据，本文旨在分析新千年里人们母语使用情况的变化以及语言转换模式。澳大利亚统计局发布的五组人口普查数据被用作二手数据源，并进行了描述性分析，以揭示2000年后澳大利亚不同母语的动态情况。结果表明，在过去二十年里，澳大利亚说母语的人数迅速飙升，传统欧洲移民群体和新的亚洲移民群体之间存在巨大差异。自2011年以来，普通话已超过意大利语和希腊语，成为澳大利亚除英语外使用人数最多的母语，而且不同州和领地之间也存在很大的地区差异。此外，与上世纪相比，不同母语使用者的排名顺序发生了很大变化。2000年后最新可用人口普查中不同语言群体的语言转换率及其与代际、性别、年龄和居住时长的交叉制表也揭示了不同的发展方向。这些发现让我们得以一窥澳大利亚不同母语的现状，并帮助我们确定影响不同语言群体转换趋势的潜在因素。更好地了解不同移民群体的语言需求可能进一步帮助政策制定者制定更有效的计划，以适应日益多样化的澳大利亚社会。
