A tide of red: this is how Canada appears on our map, where each zone designates a diffusion area as determined in the latest Statistics Canada census. English is the most common native language in the country, speaking to at least 21 million people.
It is the most common mother tongue in all provinces and territories except Quebec (French) and Nunavut (Inuktitut). In Quebec, approximately 10% of the population designated English as their mother tongue. In Nunavut, this proportion still rises to 43.5%.
Unsurprisingly, it is in Quebec that we find the highest concentration of people who have designated French as their mother tongue. Blue is very present on the map, even very dark in several places. It fades a little around Montreal in favor of other languages, such as English, Italian or Arabic, but the fact remains that 48% of Montrealers list French as their mother tongue.
Outside of Quebec, it is in New Brunswick that we find the largest proportion of native French speakers. This is approximately 31% of the population, still well below the 77.8% in Quebec.
There are also a few French-speaking communities — mainly Acadian — in Nova Scotia, such as Saulnierville or Chéticamp, or around Abrams-Village, in the Évangéline region of Prince Edward Island.
The largest number of Francophones outside Quebec, however, live in Ontario. Even though they represent only 4.2% of the population, more than half a million people have designated French as their mother tongue, most of them concentrated in the northeast of the province. A portion is also concentrated in the southeast, near the Quebec border.
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Nearly 1.3 million Canadians designated a Chinese language as their mother tongue. Mandarin (679,255 people) and Cantonese (553,375 people) are the most popular. They come respectively in first and third place among the most common non-official languages in Canada.
It is in Toronto that we find the greatest number of people who have designated a Chinese language as their mother tongue, with greater concentrations to the north of the boroughs of Scarborough and North York, and, further south, around Chinatown as well as the Riverdale neighborhood.
Markham, a suburb of Toronto, also stands out on the map. Of the city’s 337,485 respondents, 125,905 people submitted Chinese as their native language to the census, or about 37.3 percent of the entire city’s population. This proportion is very close to English, the most important language in the city, at around 40%.
The greater Vancouver area is also home to a large Chinese community. Nearly 15% of the population has Chinese as their mother tongue. In Richmond, just south of the city of Vancouver, this proportion rises to 44.5%.
The presence of Chinese languages at the top of the list of mother tongues is “something that we have already seen for several censuses in Canada,” explains Chedly Belkhodja.
The Chinese presence in Canada actually dates back to the 19th century, but the professor notes that waves of immigration have not slowed down. “We also noted towards the end of the 1980s and the 1990s, the increase in the migration of people from Hong Kong. This mobility will greatly impact the province of British Columbia, in Vancouver. » This immigration has also had a resurgence since the mid-2010s, with the rise in tensions between Hong Kong and China.
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Punjabi, a language spoken by at least 100 million speakers worldwide, is the fourth largest mother tongue in the country (666,585 people). Originally, it is spoken in Punjab, a region straddling eastern Pakistan and northwest India. It is especially found in high proportions in British Columbia, particularly in Surrey, near Vancouver (22.7% of the population).
“The data [des recensements] between 2016 and 2021 really show that there has been a strong increase in Punjabi, but also Gujarati, and other South Asian languages,” underlines Mr. Belkhodja. This increase in native speakers is directly linked to the fact that India has been at the top of the list of economic immigration to Canada for several years.
Even if it is much more important in the 21ste century, the history of immigration from Punjab dates from the last century in the country. A few hundred kilometers from Vancouver is the municipality of Abbotsford, where the oldest Sikh temple still standing in North America, the Abbotsford gurdwara, was erected in 1911.
The data shows that Punjabi speakers are settling almost everywhere in major Canadian cities – with Toronto at the top of the list – but in lesser concentration in Quebec. “It is because of the linguistic character [du Québec] », explains Chedly Belkhodja. In general, these are communities that already know English, unlike French.
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Spanish has the most native speakers in the world after Mandarin. More than twenty countries have made it their official language. In Canada, 538,870 people consider Spanish their mother tongue.
The majority of them are found in Ontario and Quebec. Native Spanish speakers are particularly numerous in Montreal: there are 85,395, compared to 78,575 in Toronto. However, we note that in general, the populations who speak Spanish are distributed across the territory of the country’s large cities, as well as in rural areas, notably in southern Quebec and southeastern Ontario.
Several factors are involved: older immigration, resulting from the reception of refugees from Chile in the 1970s or from Colombia from the 1990s, combined with the reception of asylum seekers from Central America and the South, as well as the arrival of temporary seasonal workers who then obtain permanent residence.
Professor Belkhodja sees this as an aspect of the “reality of work” in the Quebec economic context, where more and more employers are calling on temporary workers to compensate for the labor shortage. “It’s a reality that we see everywhere in Quebec, even when we travel outside of Montreal. »
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The first unofficial mother tongue in importance in Quebec, with 198,785 speakers, Arabic ranks fifth in the country. Just over half a million Canadians consider it their mother tongue.
In Quebec, it is especially in Montreal and Laval that the most native Arabic speakers live. In Montreal, higher concentrations are recorded in the Saint-Laurent borough and, towards the east of the city, especially in Saint-Léonard and Montréal-Nord. In Laval, this is especially the case in the Chomedey district.
“We have seen significant immigration in Quebec from Algeria due to political unrest,” explains Chedly Belkhodja. Algeria, however, is far from being the only source of native Arabic speakers in Quebec: the entire Maghreb stands out because of its linguistic proximity due to French colonization in the 19th century.
An older wave of immigration, dating from the mid-20th century, also formed significant Lebanese, Egyptian and Syrian communities in Quebec. However, they tend to “gravitate towards the English-speaking side”, according to Mr. Belkhodja.
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The national language of the Philippines, Tagalog is among the most popular mother tongues in the country with 461,155 speakers. Difficult to spot on the map? This is normal: although Filipino communities exist everywhere in the country’s major cities, they are often overshadowed by other majority language groups.
The Filipino diaspora in Canada still remains the second largest in the world, after that established in the United States. A community gradually formed beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, as sociopolitical conditions in the Philippines caused many people to leave the country.
In terms of numbers, Ontario has the largest number of native Tagalog speakers. However, it is in Manitoba, more precisely in Winnipeg, that there is the highest concentration. This community has seen its population grow over the years.
“The case of Manitoba is fascinating because you have the example of a province which, at a given moment, really mobilizes to develop an immigration strategy,” describes Chedly Belkhodja. In 1988, Manitoba became the first province (with the exception of Quebec, which has its own immigration system) to launch a Provincial Nominee Program.
It allows a province to select its economic immigration candidates according to certain criteria specific to its needs. “In Manitoba, there have been a lot of strategic moves to recruit in the Philippines, in certain sectors such as health,” he adds.
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Across Canada, there are just over 1.5 million people of Italian origin who have settled in the country since the 20th century. Of the approximately 319,500 Canadians who have Italian as their only mother tongue, the majority are found in Ontario (approximately 61%) and Quebec (approximately 28%). Greater Toronto is the area where we find the greatest number of native speakers of Italian, especially in the northwest, towards Vaughan, where they form a high proportion of the population.
However, Montreal remains the Canadian city where native speakers are the most numerous. They constitute a large part of the population in Saint-Léonard and Rivière-des-Prairies, to the northeast of the city. Surprisingly, in Little Italy, concentrations of native Italian speakers do not exceed 10%. In Laval, although native speakers are fewer in number, they still stand out in the north of the Duvernay district.
“The Italian community of Montreal is a very well-established community, which has a long history in Quebec,” underlines Chedly Belkhodja, noting however that Italian has been in decline for several years already in the census. Statistics Canada attributes this decline to the aging of the Italian-speaking population, the majority of which settled in the country before the 1980s, as well as to low current immigration from Italy.
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German stands out among the ten unofficial languages with the most native speakers (272,860 in 2021). Unlike the others explored so far, it is one of the only ones where its highest concentrations are far from urban centers, even if there are more German speakers in the big cities.
Found mainly on the Prairies and in some rural regions of southwestern Ontario, these communities speak several varieties of German, notably Pennsylvanian German and Mennonite Low German, spoken among the Mennonites and Amish spread across Canada and the UNITED STATES.
These migrations date, among other things, from the time of the settlement of Western Canada, relates Mr. Belkhodja. “Obviously, this affects the demographics of certain provinces, notably Alberta. »
Elsewhere in the country, however, the researcher mentions more recent waves of migration, dating from the 1980s and 1990s. “These people want to buy land; there is a kind of desire among many farmers to settle in more rural regions,” he emphasizes, and not only in the Prairies, but also in the Atlantic provinces, such as Nova Scotia or the Prince Edward Island.
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With just over 243,000 speakers, Canada’s indigenous languages are in decline, according to Statistics Canada data. The number of native speakers of indigenous languages in the country fell by almost 24% between 2016 and 2021. The proportion of people who can hold a conversation in one of these approximately 70 languages fell by around 8%. . However, we are seeing revitalization and transmission efforts in several communities across the country.
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