Census night occurs on 11 August 2026, and a petition urging the Australian Bureau of Statistics to add Hindi as an option on the form has gathered over a thousand signatures. The petition targets the wrong issue and overlooks the actual problem.
Hindi is not barred from the census. The 2026 form provides tick boxes for the six most common non-English languages reported in 2021—Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Punjabi and Greek—plus a free-text field. Anyone may enter Hindi there, as 197,132 people did in 2021.
The real limitation is that the question accepts only one answer. The ABS states that the variable records the main non-English language used at home and allows only a single response. If multiple languages are marked, only the first is kept.
The design serves a specific purpose: paired with an English proficiency question, it helps identify households that may need language support for services. However, the same data is later treated as a full picture of language use, which it was not intended to provide.
Source countries such as India record bilingualism and trilingualism through separate questions. Australia’s census does not. Recent migrants from urban, educated backgrounds in India and Pakistan often use three languages, yet the form forces a single choice.
The structure therefore underrepresents the linguistic diversity present in many diaspora households.
