Photo of Canada Day on Parliament Hill by Gerald Oskoboiny

Nine out of 10 people speak English or French most often at home

Nine out of 10 people speak English or French most often at home. Most other languages are not spoken at home nearly as frequently as they are reported as mother tongue.

The 2001 Census showed that 22.0% of the population spoke French most often at home at the time of the census, slightly lower than the 22.9% who reported it as their mother tongue.

The proportion of the population that spoke English most often at home, 67.5%, was appreciably higher than the proportion whose mother tongue was English (59.1%). This was due to the attraction of English for members of other language groups. Even in Quebec, where anglophones represent a minority, the same situation prevails.

Only 10.5% of the population spoke a non-official language most often at home, far lower than the 18.0% who reported a non-official language as mother tongue. These individuals adopted one or the other official language as home language. Generally speaking, the longer immigrants stay in Canada, the more likely they are to speak English or French at home.

- Stats Canada

Chinese reaffirmed as Canada's third most common mother tongue

Italian- 1.58% German- 1.48 Punjabi- 0.92 Spanish- 0.83 Portuguese- 0.72  Polish- 0.70 Arabic- 0.67 All Others- 7.35

The 2001 Census reaffirmed the position of Chinese** as Canada's third most common mother tongue.

Almost 872,400 people reported Chinese as their mother tongue, up 136,400 or 18.5% from 1996. They accounted for 2.9% of the total population of Canada, up from 2.6% five years earlier. Italian remained in fourth place, and German fifth, although their numbers declined. Punjabi moved into sixth, and Spanish slipped to seventh.

Language groups from European countries still made up the majority of the allophone population. However, the population of these groups is much older, and therefore, their numbers continued to decline.

Allophone groups from Asian and Middle Eastern countries recorded the largest increases in numbers. In addition to Chinese, the language groups which reported the largest gains in numbers since the 1996 Census were Punjabi, whose numbers increased by 70,200, or 32.7%; Arabic, which increased by 54,400, or 32.7%; Urdu, which rose by 43,100, to almost double its 1996 level; and Tagalog, up 41,600 or 26.3%. 

These five groups accounted for about one-third of the country's total allophone population in 2001. In British Columbia, these five accounted for one-half of the allophone population, and in Ontario and Alberta, they formed about 30%.

Nationally, the number of individuals reporting Italian, Ukrainian, German, Polish and Dutch as mother tongue all declined.

- Stats Canada. Please see article further down about the term " Chinese".

Aboriginal languages: Cree the largest language group

In 2001, among Aboriginal languages reported as mother tongue, the three largest groups were Cree (80,000 people), Inuktitut (29,700) and Ojibway (23,500). These three groups were in the same order in the 1991 and 1996 censuses.

Almost two-thirds (64%) of the population with Inuktitut as mother tongue lived in Nunavut, and 30% lived in Quebec. Three-quarters of the Cree population lived in the Prairie provinces.

More complete information on Aboriginal languages groups will be released by Stats Canada on January 21, 2003., along with Aboriginal data on age, sex and geographical distribution.

Population and growth rate of language groups, Canada, Provinces, Territories and Canada less Quebec,  2001

Anglophone	2001		Growth rate
	Number	%	1991-1996	1996-2001
Canada	17,521,880	59.1	4.7	2.6
Newfoundland and Labrador	500,075	98.4	-3.0	-7.2
Prince Edward Island	125,390	94.0	3.5	0.3
Nova Scotia	834,780	93.0	0.8	-0.4
New Brunswick	465,160	64.6	3.4	-2.4
Quebec	591,365	8.3	-0.7	-4.9
Ontario	8,041,995	71.3	4.5	3.4
Manitoba	831,820	75.4	3.6	1.2
Saskatchewan	822,640	85.4	1.4	-0.1
Alberta	2,395,765	81.5	6.3	10.1
British Columbia	2,849,185	73.6	9.6	1.4
Yukon Territory	24,770	86.8	8.4	-6.9
Northwest Territories	28,860	77.8		-4.6
Nunavut	7,175	26.9		18.0
Canada Less Quebec	16,930,515	75.2	4.9	2.9
Francophone
	2001		Growth rate
	Number	%	1991-1996	1996-2001
Canada	6,782,320	22.9	2.3	1.1
Newfoundland and Labrador	2,360	0.5	-14.8	-3.1
Prince Edward Island	5,890	4.4	-0.6	3.1
Nova Scotia	35,380	3.9	-3.2	-2.6
New Brunswick	239,400	33.2	-0.8	-1.3
Quebec	5,802,020	81.4	2.8	1.1
Ontario	509,265	4.5	-0.7	1.9
Manitoba	45,920	4.2	-3.3	-6.5
Saskatchewan	18,645	1.9	-8.7	-6.3
Alberta	62,240	2.1	-2.5	12.6
British Columbia	58,891	1.5	10.0	3.8
Yukon Territory	945	3.3	29.6	-19.5
Northwest Territories	1,000	2.7		-0.5
Nunavut	400	1.5		-2.8
Canada Less Quebec	980,270	4.4	-0.6	1.0
Allophone
	2001		Growth rate
	Number	%	1991-1996	1996-2001
Canada	5,334,770	18.0	15.1	12.5
Newfoundland and Labrador	5,645	1.1	10.3	-0.6
Prince Edward Island	2,120	1.6	34.5	-0.2
Nova Scotia	27,405	3.1	16.1	8.0
New Brunswick	11,930	1.7	6.5	15.9
Quebec	732,160	10.3	13.9	7.4
Ontario	2,734,280	24.2	16.5	15.6
Manitoba	225,950	20.5	-2.7	-1.3
Saskatchewan	121,875	12.7	-6.1	-8.3
Alberta	483,125	16.4	5.2	10.3
British Columbia	960,780	24.8	30.0	16.7
Yukon Territory	2,835	9.9	30.2	-1.2
Northwest Territories	7,250	19.5		-11.7
Nunavut	19,070	71.6		5.0
Canada Less Quebec	4,602,675	20.4	15.3	13.3
-Statistics Canada figures, 2002

See also Ethnologue: Canada

for a discussion of each of these languages and more.

**The Languages of China

[pp. 312-313 pf the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 1987]

Because there has long been a single method for writing Chinese, and a common literary and cultural history, a tradition has grown up of referring to, the eight main varieties of speech in China as dialects'. But in fact they are as different from each other (mainly in pronunciation and vocabulary) as French or Spanish is from Italian, the dialects of the south-east being linguistically the furthest apart. The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages. However, it must also be recognized that each variety consists of a large number of dialects, many of which may themselves be referred to as languages. The boundaries between one so-called language and the next are not always easy to define.

The Chinese refer to themselves and their language, in any of the forms below, as Han - a name which derives from the Han dynasty (202 BC-AD 220). Han Chinese is thus to be distinguished from the non-Han minority languages used in China. There are over 50 of these languages (such as Tibetan, Russian, Uighur¹, Kazakh, Mongolian, and Korean), spoken by around 6% of the population.

¹ Eastern Turkestan (also known as Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region)

Please see Chinese Cultural Studies page.

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