Non-official languages

In 1991, 5 million Canadians (18% of Canada's population) spoke a language other than English or French and 4.1 million of these had a non-official language as their mother tongue. This situation is explained by the large immigration waves of the past forty years. A lot of the immigrants came from countries where neither English nor French is spoken.

Almost half of these individuals could be found in Ontario. In fact, one Ontarian out of five had a mother tongue other than English or French (2 million individuals). The most popular destinations of newcomers are: Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver. View a clickable map (Online!) to access pie charts showing the five most important non-official language groups in the 25 Census Metropolitan Areas.

The map below shows two trends: the increased presence of immigrant groups in major cities, and the large proportion of people in the North, speaking non-official languages. The latter occurs because Aboriginal people make up a large proportion of the population in most northern regions of Canada.