Through the Languages Services Strategy, the Victorian Office of Multicultural
Affairs (VOMA) is working to support strategic improvements to interpreting and
translating services in Victoria. In order for VOMA to be able to make decisions
about policy directions it requires more detailed information regarding the
numbers of speakers of African languages as the use of these languages is
emerging in Victorian communities.
Many countries in Africa are characterised by a high level of linguistic and
cultural diversity in their populations. The political and ethnic strife and conflict
in a number of these countries has led in recent years to a high proportion
(approximately 70%) of humanitarian and refugee immigrants to Victoria being
from African countries. Whilst information is available about the source
countries of these new arrivals, there are currently no accurate centrally
collected statistics (eg. from Australian Bureau of Statistics- Census) on the
language/s they speak and government databases are not currently designed to
cope very effectively with the large number of languages which are new to
Australia and, in many cases, spoken by comparatively small language
communities.