Close to seven million people speak an immigrant language

• Immigrant languages—whose presence is due to the immigration waves that Canada has experienced over the centuries—originate from all continents and belong to a variety of language families.^Note 11 In 2011, they constituted the mother tongue of more than 6.8 million people, or 20.6% of the Canadian population.^Note 12
• People with an Asian language as their mother tongue comprise over half (56%) of the immigrant-language population in Canada. In addition, more than 40% of the country’s immigrant-language population had a mother tongue of European origin.
• Two languages from the Romance family—Spanish and Italian—were reported by 439,000 and 438,000 people, respectively. Indo-Iranian languages include Persian, mainly spoken in Iran, with 177,000 people, along with various languages of the Indian subcontinent, including Punjabi (460,000)—the top immigrant language reported in Canada—as well as Urdu (194,000), and Hindi and Gujarati, each with just over 100,000 people.
• Within the Chinese language family, the three main reported languages are: Cantonese (reported by 389,000 people), Mandarin (255,000) and Chinese, n.o.s.^Note 13 (441,000).
• Other language families spoken by relatively large numbers of people are Slavic (with Polish, Russian and Ukrainian as the main languages), Germanic (primarily German, Dutch and Yiddish), Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew and Amharic) and Malayo-Polynesian (Tagalog, Ilocano and Malay).

Description for figure 35

Notes