B.C. leads provinces for residents whose primary language at home isn’t English or French

British Columbia has more residents than any other province whose predominant language at home is not English or French, according to Statistics Canada.

The 2021 census found that 17.1 per cent of B.C. individuals fall under that category, compared to 15.7 per cent in Ontario — the second-highest — and 1.4 per cent in Newfoundland, the lowest.

Nunavut, however, Canada’s youngest territory, has 42.2 per cent of residents reporting that English or French is not their primary language at home.

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The B.C. findings are an increase of 1.5 per cent from the 2016 census results, while the number of homes where English is most used dipped by half a per cent over the five-year span.

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The results published Wednesday also found one in four Canadians have a mother tongue other than English or French, and about 12 per cent predominantly speak a non-official language at home.

Mandarin and Punjabi are the most common non-official languages, with more than a million people predominantly speaking one of the two.

Apart from English and French, Mandarin is spoken by the largest number of people in Vancouver. In both Kamloops and the Abbotsford and Mission areas, it’s Punjabi.

More than one in four Vancouverites — 27.6 per cent — speaks a non-official language at home, along with just under 21 per cent in Abbotsford and Mission.

0:35 Number of people who speak languages other than English and French growing at fast rate: StatCan

Statistics Canada noted a large increase in the growth of the number of Canadians who predominantly speak South Asian languages such as Punjabi, Gujarati, Hindi or Malayalam since the last census, a rise fueled by immigration.

The growth rate of the population speaking South Asian languages was at least eight times greater than that of the overall Canadian population during the same period, but closely aligns with immigration trends from those countries.

The census also revealed British Columbia, Quebec and Yukon are the only places where the number of Canadians who predominantly spoke French in the home increased between 2016 and 2021.

The most common Indigenous language spoken in B.C. homes is Dakelh, also called Carrier.

— with files from The Canadian Press’s Laura Osman