Canada is home to a fair amount of linguistic diversity across its 10 provinces, with large cities like Toronto and Vancouver filled with languages from around the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, English and French are the most spoken languages in Canada, but they are by no means the only ones there.
Did you know that there are more than 70 Aboriginal languages currently in use Canada? Or that Mandarin is the third most common mother tongue? Or that the number of Canadians able to speak a language other than English or French is currently on the rise?
Admittedly, having two official languages complicates matters from the get-go. Canada’s census tracks a wide variety of linguistic demographics, including home language, mother tongue, first official language and language used most often at work.
This detailed level of attention is not a coincidence. Canada’s Official Languages Commissioner Graham Fraser was quoted in a 2009 print edition of The Hill Times, saying “in the same way that race is at the core of what it means to be American and at the core of an American experience and class is at the core of British experience, I think that language is at the core of Canadian experience.”
Here’s a breakdown of the 211 languages spoken in Canada — and the complex histories they reveal.
If you travel to Canada with some working knowledge of English under your belt, you’ll probably do just fine. English is one of two official languages spoken in Canada, and with 86.2 percent of Canadians able to conduct a conversation in English (and 63.8 percent speaking English at home in 2021), it’s the overwhelming majority language among Canucks. There are a few Canadian words and phrases you might not be entirely familiar with, but you’ll get the hang of it.
This is true perhaps everywhere besides Quebec and Nunavut, where Inuit is the mother tongue of 83 percent of the population.
French is an important language to know in Canada, and the proportion of Canadians who could speak both English and French was at 18 percent, its highest ever, in 2021.
However, the prevalence of French as both a mother tongue and a language spoken at home is declining, if ever so slightly, even in the Francophone territory of Quebec.
This decline is in spite of decades of strict language laws aimed at preserving the primacy of the French language in Quebec, which were first passed in 1977. It is hotly contested whether these laws are sufficiently stringent, though. As recently as 2022, the laws were made even stricter, giving the government more power to investigate companies who don’t comply.
“My wish is that everywhere, commercial signage unequivocally reminds us that we are indeed in Quebec,” Minister of Culture and Communications Hélène David told reporters at the time of the laws’ first passing.
With Mandarin and Cantonese firmly in place as Canada’s third and fourth most common languages, Chinese would be a shoo-in for third official language.
What’s more, its influence is growing. The number of people who spoke a Chinese language at home jumped up 16.8 percent between 2011 and 2016.
Chinese immigrants had already arrived to Canada prior to 1867, the year of Confederation. Chinese immigration swelled again as recently as the 1990s, when the majority of immigrants coming to Canada were of Chinese descent.
That’s not to say the Canadian government always welcomed them with open arms, however. Many of the earliest immigrants came on account of the Gold Rush in British Columbia, and the government soon took steps to enact anti-immigration legislation. The 1885 Chinese Immigration Act required all Chinese immigrants (except for merchants and students ) to pay a $50 head tax.
Today, members of the Canadian government are actively trying to lower the bar of entry for Chinese immigrants. Last year, Immigration Minister John McCallum was working to make it easier for Chinese tourists, students and temporary workers to get visas.
Here, within this sliver of the language pie chart, lies a great deal of linguistic diversity.
With Punjabi and Tagalog ranked below Mandarin and Cantonese as the most commonly spoken languages in Canada, it’s fair to say that there’s a strong Asian influence up north.
As of 2016, Tagalog was the sixth most common language in Canada, but it’s also the fastest-growing one, with the number of people speaking Tagalog at home jumping by 35 percent between 2011 and 2016. Naturally, it follows that the Philippines is a major origin country for Canadian immigrants. Arabic, Persian (Farsi), Hindi and Urdu also grew significantly in that time period.
Overall, Spanish, Arabic, Italian, German and Urdu are the next most common languages, respectively.
Canada’s most obscure languages (such as Catalan, Fijian, Belarusian, Bilen and Kashmiri) all exist in enclaves of a couple thousand speakers or fewer.
For some of these smaller communities, geographic concentration matters. There’s a notable contingent of Arabic, Spanish and Yiddish speakers in Montreal, Gujarati families in Northern Alberta, Filipino immigrants in the Yukon and Korean speakers in New Brunswick.
Canada comprises vast stretches of sparsely populated land, and it is in a lot of these far-flung regions that Aboriginal tongues reign supreme among non-official languages (that is, languages other than English and French).
In this interactive map compiled by The 10 and 3, you can easily see how geographically dominant native languages are. They take up most of the map!
Aboriginal tongues are represented by purple on the map.
Though this visual eminence is somewhat deceptive when you take actual population figures into account, it speaks to the importance of pre-colonial languages in Canada, especially when you consider that the number of people who speak Inuktitut actually grew between 2011 and 2016. Additionally, the number of people who speak one of these languages at home is higher than the number of people with an Aboriginal mother tongue, which means more people are acquiring them as second languages.
Cree is the most populous Aboriginal language, with 96,575 native speakers (0.25 percent of the total population).
The majority of these languages are spoken by a relatively small number of people. Only Cree, Inuktitut, Ojibway, Oji-Cree, Dene and Montagnais (Innu) are spoken by more than 10,000 people in Canada. There are more native tongues that are spoken by fewer than 100 people, and they include Tsuut’ina, Oneida, Comox, Southern Tutchone, Squamish, Cayuga, Southern East Cree and an assortment of other Algonquian, Siouan, Athabaskan, Iroquoian and Wakashan languages.
This article was originally published on September 26, 2017. It has been updated.
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