More than half a million Canadians spoke predominantly Punjabi at home in 2021

MORE than half a million Canadians spoke predominantly Punjabi at home in 2021, according to Statistics Canada.

Also, more than half a million spoke predominantly Mandarin at home.

According to the results of the 2021 Census, Mandarin (531,000 speakers) and Punjabi (520,000 speakers) remained the two languages other than English and French spoken predominantly at home by the largest number of Canadians in 2021.

The number of Mandarin speakers grew from 2016 to 2021 (+15%), but was outpaced by the growth in the number of Punjabi speakers (+49%).

While the Canadian population increased 5.2% during this period, driven mainly by immigration, the number of Canadians who spoke predominantly a South Asian language at home grew faster, particularly speakers of Malayalam (+129% to 35,000 people), Hindi (+66% to 92,000 people), Punjabi (+49% to 520,000 people) and Gujarati (+43% to 92,000 people). In fact, the growth rate of the number of speakers of these languages was at least eight times larger than that of the entire Canadian population.

Other languages spoken predominantly at home also grew rapidly, including Tigrigna, an East African language (+114% to 22,000 people), Turkish (+48% to 28,000 people), Tagalog (+29% to 275,000 people), Arabic (+28% to 286,000 people), Persian languages (+26% to 180,000 people) and Spanish (+20% to 317,000 people).

In contrast, there was a decline in the number of Canadians who spoke predominantly certain European languages at home, such as Italian, Polish and Greek.

Mandarin: 530,945

Punjabi: 520,390

Yue (Cantonese): 393,430

Spanish: 317,365

Arabic: 285,915

Tagalog: 275,040

Persian languages: 179,745

Urdu: 158,040

Russian: 125,780

Korean: 125,525

 

Other highlights:

* English is the first official language spoken by just over three in four Canadians. This proportion increased from 74.8% in 2016 to 75.5% in 2021.

* French is the first official language spoken by an increasing number of Canadians, but the proportion fell from 22.2% in 2016 to 21.4% in 2021.

* From 2016 to 2021, the number of Canadians who spoke predominantly French at home rose in Quebec, British Columbia and Yukon, but decreased in the other provinces and territories.

* The proportion of Canadians who spoke predominantly French at home decreased in all the provinces and territories, except Yukon.

* For the first time in the census, the number of people in Quebec whose first official language spoken is English topped 1 million and their proportion of the population rose from 12% in 2016 to 13% in 2021. Moreover, 7 in 10 English speakers lived on Montréal Island or in Montérégie.

* The proportion of bilingual English-French Canadians (18.0%) remained virtually unchanged from 2016. From 2016 to 2021, the increase in the bilingualism rate in Quebec (from 44.5% to 46.4%) offset the decrease observed outside Quebec (from 9.8% to 9.5%).

* In Canada, 4 in 10 people could conduct a conversation in more than one language. This proportion rose from 39% in 2016 to 41.2% in 2021. In addition, 1 in 11 could speak three or more languages.

* In 2021, one in four Canadians had at least one mother tongue other than English or French, and one in eight Canadians spoke predominantly a language other than English or French at home—both the highest proportions on record.

* Among Canadians whose mother tongue is neither English nor French, 7 in 10 spoke an official language at home at least on a regular basis.

* In 2021, 189,000 people reported having at least one Indigenous mother tongue and 183,000 reported speaking an Indigenous language at home at least on a regular basis. Cree languages and Inuktitut are the main Indigenous languages spoken in Canada.

* Among individuals with an Indigenous mother tongue, four out of five spoke that language at home at least on a regular basis, and half spoke it predominantly.

 

Canada and U.S.

While Canada has two official languages and the United States does not, parallels can be drawn between these two countries with respect to languages spoken at home, says Statistics Canada.

According to the 2019 American Community Survey, more than one in five Americans (21.8%) aged 5 years and older spoke a language other than English at home. In Canada, 22.7% of the population spoke a language other than English or French at home at least on a regular basis in 2021. Spanish is the main language spoken in the United States, after English and ahead of Chinese languages, Vietnamese, Tagalog and Arabic. In 2019, there were also over 1 million people who spoke French at home in the United States.

From 2016 to 2019, an increase was observed in the number of speakers of Chinese and South Asian languages (including Hindi and Gujarati) in both the United States and Canada. In addition, the number of people in the United States who speak Polish, Greek or Italian at home decreased, as it did in Canada.