The line graph provides data on the number of people residing in Australia, who used four different languages – Chinese, Arabic, Italian and Greek – as their first language for 15-year period, spanning form 1986 to 2011.
Overall, it is evident that the number of individuals in Australia, who used Chinese and Arabic as their mother tongue significantly increased over the given period, whereas the opposite trend can be witnessed in the number of people who used the other two languages as their first language.
In 1986, the most common foreign language that was used as the first language in Australia was Greek, which made up around 230,000 users. Italian was ranked second with roughly 150,000 native Italian people, which was followed by Chinese – the language that was to get popular in the following years – with slightly more than 100,000 people. Arabic language was the least commonly used language at that time.
After five years, by 1991, figures had already started to change notably, with two European language users – Greek and Italian – going down in number, while other two languages went up, with Chinese language becoming the second most common foreign language in Australia.
The number of Greek and Italian users continued to decline, in an identical pace, until the end of the period (2011); however, the number of people who spoke Italian as their first language remained static in the last 5 years from 2006 to 2011, with only around 100,000 people, while this figure in Greek users was higher, around 185,000 people.
The popularity of Chinese language skyrocketed by the year 2011, with roughly 350,000 native users in Australia. Arabic language users, on the other hand, despite having the same trend, the number increased moderately, going up only by 100,000.