Chinese Australians
As a whole, Australian residents identifying themselves as having Chinese ancestry made up 5.6% of those nominating their ancestry at the 2016 census and numbered 1,213,903. At the 2016 census, 509,555 people declared that they were born in Mainland China, 86,886 declared that they were born in Hong Kong, while 46,882 declared that they were born in Taiwan. There are also a large number of persons of Chinese ancestry among those born in Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Chinese Australians
Before the end of the twentieth century, Chinese Australian were historically of predominately Cantonese and Hakka descent from Hong Kong and Guangdong province, and Cantonese was the dominant language. Due to more recent immigration from other regions of Mainland China and Taiwan, Mandarin has surpassed Cantonese by a wide margin by number of speakers. At the 2016 census, 596,711 persons declared that they spoke Mandarin at home (the most common language spoken at home in Australia after English at 2.5%), followed by Cantonese at 280,943 (the third most common after English at 1.2%). In total, there were 927,944 people who spoke a Chinese language at home, a figure which includes Mandarin, Cantonese and other Chinese languages such as Hokkien and Hakka. Second or higher generation Chinese Australians are often either monolingual in English or bilingual to varying degrees with Chinese.