Toronto is Canada’s foreign language capital — at least in the comfort of home.
About 1.8 million people in Canada’s largest city said they usually speak an immigrant language at home, according to census data Statistics Canada released Wednesday.
That number is almost 2.5 times larger than the second-highest city, Vancouver, where 712,000 residents reported speaking something other than English, French or an aboriginal language most often at home.
Despite the high number of immigrant language-speakers in Toronto homes, the types of languages they speak are not wildly varied — about one-third of those who speak an immigrant language at home uses one of five languages: Cantonese, Punjabi, Chinese, Urdu and Tamil.
Other top immigrant languages spoken in Toronto homes, in descending order, are: Spanish, Mandarin, Italian, Persian, Portuguese and Russian.
“We do see an increase in those speaking immigrant languages,” said Jane Badets, a director general at Statistics Canada. “But English and French are still your dominant languages.”
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As far as Canada’s predominant language is concerned in Toronto, the proportion of the population speaking English at home continued the decline noted between the 2001 and 2006 census years.
In 2001, nearly 63 per cent of people in Toronto reported speaking only English at home. That number dropped in 2006 to about 59 per cent, and again in 2011 to 55 per cent.
Toronto is one of a small handful of communities where most Canadians speaking non-official languages were living when Statistics Canada collected the census data in 2011. Roughly 90 per cent of Canadians who said they usually speak an immigrant language at home reside in one of the country’s 33 census metropolitan areas; 80 per cent of them lived in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa-Gatineau, the census data shows.
Wednesday’s numbers demonstrate how Canada is increasingly a country of many tongues, with nearly 20 per cent of the population speaking a language other than English or French at home.
Of more than 200 reported languages — and excluding the two official languages — Punjabi, Chinese languages, Spanish, Tagalog, Arabic, Mandarin, Italian, Urdu and German were the most common across the country.
Tagalog, the dominant Filipino language, saw the largest growth nationwide, increasing 64 per cent as a language used in homes.
“Immigration is a major drive behind the trend,” Bidets said of the national increase in non-official languages spoken at home. “We’re seeing immigrants come to Canada from diverse backgrounds, as we have for many years.”
The data suggests that Canada’s foreign-born population is quite diverse, and is becoming more so. In 2011, Canadians reported 191 mother-tongue languages including English, French, aboriginal languages and immigrant languages.
That figure is up from 2006, when Canadians reported almost 150 different mother tongues on that year’s census.
Toronto ranks third nationally in terms of where the most mother-tongue languages were reported, with 163. The city ranks behind Vancouver and Edmonton, where people there reported 179 and 167 different mother-tongue languages respectively.
“The situation is more diverse,” Badets said. “We’re seeing the proportion speaking immigrant languages increase, but at the same time, the dominance of English and French in Canadian society is still there.”
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