Census 2018: Hindi slips to fifth place in list of most spoken language, Number of Fiji-Hindi speaker rise

The Census 2018 has brought the unwelcome news where Hindi has slipped from the earlier fourth to now fifth position in terms of spoken by the number of peoples in New Zealand.

This is despite a literal increase in the number of Hindi-speakers in census 2018.

According to earliest census report released on Monday, September 23, the number of Hindi speaking people was 69,471 (or 1.5 per cent of the total population).

This is slowest ever increase in the number of Hindi speakers (a mere 4.76 per cent), at least since 2001.

In 2013 the number of Hindi speakers increased by 48.7 per cent whereas in 2006 there was a whopping 96.0 per cent increase.

Hindi has lost its place to the Northern Chinese (including Mandarin) language which was spoken by 95,253 people (or 2.0 per cent of the total population). In 2013 census, Northern Chinese speakers were 52,263 people as opposed to the number of Hindi speakers, which were 66,309 people

In 2013 census, Hindi was spoken by 66,309 people (or 1.7 per cent), thus suggesting a paltry increase of just around 3000 people in the last five years – a fact that is likely to raise some apprehensions, given an increase in the total Kiwi-Indian population and the number of people born in India. The number of people born in India increased from 1.7 per cent in 2013 to 2.5 per cent in 2018.

Hindi’s loss is Fiji-Hindi’s gain

As opposed to a negligible increase in the number of Hindi-language speakers, there was a whopping 1501.2 per cent increase in the number of Fiji-Hindi speakers.

In 2018 census, 26, 805 people identified Fiji-Hindi language as a language that they prefer to speak, as opposed to mere 1674 people in the 2013 census.

This phenomenal increase in the number of Fiji-Hindi speakers does not corroborate with a similar level of sudden increase in the Fiji-Indian population in the last five years.

It is likely that the people who had earlier mentioned Hindi as their spoken language had taken away their preferences from Hindi-language.

How other Indian-languages fared in census 2018?

Meanwhile, other Indian-languages speaking group such as Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, and Gujarati witnessed a proportionate increase in the number of speakers of respective languages.