Highlights

(The following remarks are taken from some of the Statistics Canada publications listed in the bibliography.)

• The linguistic make-up of Canada has been greatly influenced by immigration, which increased the number of Canadians with a non-official language as their mother tongue in the short term, and led to growth in the anglophone population in the longer term.

   

• The percentage of Canadians with English as their mother tongue changed very little between 1951 and 1991 (staying at about 60%). However, in Quebec, anglophones declined from 14% to 9% of the population.

   

• Canadians with French as their mother tongue declined from 29% to 24% of the population between 1951 and 1991. In Quebec, their proportion remained fairly stable at just over 80% of the population, while outside Quebec they declined from 7% to 5%.

   

• The percentage of Canadians able to speak French remained at about 32% between 1951 and 1991, while those able to speak English rose slightly to reach 83% by 1991.

   

• English-French bilingualism rose markedly in Canada between 1951 and 1991. The number of bilingual Canadians more than doubled during the period, rising from 1.7 million to 4.4 million. Their proportion of the total population rose from 12% to 16%.

   

• Canadians with a non-official language as a mother tongue represented 15% of the population in 1991, up from 12% in 1951.

   

• In 1991, a little more than half of the population (55%) which declared a non-official language as a mother tongue lived in one of the three major urban centres: Toronto, Montréal or Vancouver.

   

• The ranking of most frequently reported mother tongue for non-official languages changed markedly between 1951 and 1991. In 1951, Ukrainian and German ranked first and second, whereas in 1991, first and second place were Italian and Chinese, respectively.

   

• In 1991, the following four non-official languages were by far the most common: Italian, Chinese, German and Spanish.

   

• In 1991, less than 1% of the population declared an Aboriginal language as a mother tongue.