Languages Spoken in Toronto

After more than a year of waiting, the data finally came out last week. Statistics Canada released the language-related statistics of the 2006 census.

Here are the top 20 languages “spoken most often at home” in Toronto, my home town, and their corresponding head-counts and percentages:

1. English – 2746480 (55.31%)
2. Italian – 185760 (3.74%)
3. Chinese, n.o.s. – 172040 (3.46%)
4. Cantonese – 166655 (3.36%)
5. Panjabi (Punjabi) – 132745 (2.67%)
6. Spanish – 108380 (2.18%)
7. Portuguese – 108185 (2.18%)
8. Tagalog (Pilipino, Filipino) – 100420 (2.02%)
9. Urdu – 98575 (1.99%)
10. Tamil – 93590 (1.88%)
11. Polish – 80090 (1.61%)
12. Russian – 65210 (1.31%)
13. Persian (Farsi) – 63975 (1.29%)
14. Mandarin – 62850 (1.27%)
15. French – 58590 (1.18%)
16. Arabic – 56155 (1.13%)
17. Gujarati – 54160 (1.09%)
18. Korean – 47750 (0.96%)
19. Greek – 46305 (0.93%)
20. Vietnamese – 45325 (0.91%)

Here is an interesting point about the Chinese-speakers. The “Chinese n.o.s.” category includes responses of ‘Chinese’ as well as all Chinese languages other than Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese, Chaochow (Teochow), Fukien, Hakka and Shanghainese. This number just too big for the minor Chinese dialect speakers. Therefore, we would expect most people in this category probably speak a major dialect. Somehow they just put down “Chinese” instead of the specific dialect in the census.

Who would do this? My speculation is that those who can speak Mandarin together with another dialect would have a tendency to do so. On the other hand, those who can speak only one Chinese dialect would more likely put down the dialect instead of ‘Chinese’.

If my speculation is correct, then there are in fact many more people who speak Mandarin than what is shown in the data.

No matter what, if we add up all the people in the ‘Chinese n.o.s.’ category together with those in the Cantonese and Mandarin categories, they make up about 8% of the Toronto population. This is about 1 in 12 Torontonians. This is quite a significant portion, considered only 6 out of those 12 speaks English as their mother-tongue.