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Among its 10 provinces, there is a fair amount of linguistic diversity in Canada, particularly in large cities such as Toronto and Vancouver, which are swarming with languages from all over the world. English and French, however, are the most spoken languages by far, making Canada an officially bilingual country.
English is spoken by 58.1% of Canada’s total population, which translates to over 20 million native speakers. However, 86.2% of Canadians are able to conduct a conversation in English and 74.5% of them speak English at home. This makes English the overwhelming majority language by far, apart from Quebec – Which is predominantly French – and Nunavut, where Inuit is the native language of 83% of the population.
French is the second most widely spoken language in Canada. In 2016, the percentage of Canadians who could speak both English and French was at 17.9, its highest ever. However, in recent years there has been a slight decline in the prevalence of French as both a mother tongue and a language spoken at home, which is true even for the francocentric region of Quebec.
The next most spoken language in Canada is Chinese. Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese speakers make up for about 3.5% of Canada’s total population, or a little over 1.2 million native speakers. The influence of Chinese in Canada is increasing, with the number of people who spoke Chinese at home increased for nearly 17% between 2011 and 2016. The influence of Chinese in Canada is mainly a result of Chinese immigrants, whose first arrival happened prior to 1867, and again as recently as the 1990s.
Apart from English and French, there are 209 other languages spoken in Canada. Accounting for about 18.8% of Canada’s total population are other immigrant languages which can also be heard within Canada, such as: Punjabi, Tagalog, Spanish, Arabic, Italian, German, Urdu, Catalan, Fijian, Belarusan, Bilen, Kashmiri, Yiddish, Filipino and Korean. Punjabi is the fifth most common language in Canada after English, French, Mandarin and Cantonese, most commonly spoken by immigrants in Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary.
There is a total of 67 Aboriginal tongues spoken inside Canada, accounting for about 0.6% of the total population, or 213,230 native speakers, with Cree being the most widely spoken Aboriginal language. Other Aboriginal languages include Inuktitut, Ojibway, Oji-Cree, Dene and Montagnais (Innu) which are spoken by more than 10,000 people, as well as those spoken by fewer than 100 people, such as Sarsi, Oneida, Comox, Southern Tutchone, Squamish, Cayuga, Southern East Cree, Siouan, Algonquian, Athabaskan, Wakashan and Iroquoian.
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