The trend has accelerated in the last five years.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics released the results of the 2016 census, which shows a continuing decline in the number of Australian residents who speak the Croatian language at home, reports SBS on June 28, 2017.
The downward trend of the number of Croatian speakers has accelerated over the past five years.
One of the questions in the questionnaire at the census was the language spoken by the respondents in their homes. The Croatian language was selected by 56,885 persons. This was 6,732 persons fewer than ten years earlier, in 2006, when 63,617 persons reported that they spoke the Croatian language at home.
Much of the difference has taken place in the last five years, since in 2011 the number of Croatian speakers was 61,547, which means that the number of speakers of Croatian language between the two censuses was reduced by 4,662 persons, or by 7.5 percent, during the five-year period.
Speakers of Croatian language by place of residence
New South Wales 21,156
Victoria 20,504
Western Australia 5,556
Queensland 4,009
South Australia 3,075
Capital Territory 2,272
Tasmania 270
Northern Territory 43
The number of speakers of some other European languages in Australia is also in decline: Italian, Greek, Macedonian and Serbian.
The number of Macedonian speakers in 2016 was 66,019, almost 3,000 less than at the previous census.
The number of Serbian speakers in the same period decreased by 1,313 and currently, stands at 53,801.
There are more than 15,800 Australians who at home use the Bosniak language
In Australia, more than 300 languages are spoken in addition to English, and the largest number of speakers use Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Arabic languages.
