Toronto: Canada's linguistic capital
Census data show Chinese retains No. 2 spot among city's languages


ELAINE CAREY
DEMOGRAPHICS REPORTER

Greater Toronto has rapidly become the multilingual capital of Canada, with close to half its residents speaking a mother tongue other than English.

Four of every 10 people in the Toronto metropolitan census area, or 1,898,000, are allophones — people who learned neither English nor French as their first language, according to new data from the 2001 census released yesterday. That's up 17.8 per cent since 1996.

That increase is entirely the result of immigration and a large influx of language groups from Asia and the Middle East, especially those speaking Chinese, Punjabi, Urdu, Tagalog and Tamil.

Toronto-area residents speak more than 60 languages, but the dominant one after English is Chinese — including Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka and other dialects — the first language of 355,270 residents. Some 41 per cent of all Canadian residents whose mother tongue is Chinese live in the Toronto area.

After English, the top five languages spoken in Toronto last year were Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, Punjabi and Tagalog.

For many mother tongues, Toronto is the Canadian heartland. It's home to 79 per cent of all Tamil speakers in Canada, 60 per cent of Gujarati speakers, two-thirds of Urdu speakers and half of the Russian speakers.

Languages common among immigrants of the past century — Italian, Slovak, Dutch, German, Czech, Finnish and Lithuanian — are all declining as first languages, since those countries have produced fewer immigrants over the past 30 years.

But English is by far the most common language spoken in Greater Toronto, with 3.94 million of its 4.86 million residents reporting they speak it at home.

Canadians reported more than 100 languages on the census. One of every six across the country are allophones, up 12.5 per cent from 1996 — three times the population growth rate.

Chinese, which overtook Italian as Canada's third most-common mother tongue in 1996, retained that position in the latest census. Italian remains fourth and German fifth, although their numbers are declining. Punjabi moved into sixth place and Spanish slipped to seventh.

Because of their attractiveness to new immigrants, Canada's major cities, especially Toronto, are by far the most multilingual.

"Immigration has always been a part of cities, but it's accelerating and increasing in amount and diversity," said Monica Boyd, professor and Canada research chair of sociology at the University of Toronto.

As migration becomes easier, "there is virtually no country in the world that someone can't move from," she said. "Big cities start to have enormous potential for getting even bigger."

While immigrants from a certain country once congregated in one area of the city, now they settle in multiple areas as their numbers grow, she said.

But census data also show that official-language bilingualism is increasing. Some 5.23 million Canadians, or 17.7 per cent of the population, reported they speak both English and French, up 8.1 per cent from 1996.

Most of that growth was in Quebec, where two of every five people termed themselves bilingual, up from 37.8 per cent five years earlier.

Outside Quebec, the rate remained virtually unchanged, at 10.3 per cent. But the bilingualism rate fell by almost 2 percentage points among people 15 to 19 — the age bilingualism peaks because French is learned at school — to 14.7 per cent.

Those who learn French in school tend to lose it rapidly when they leave, Statistics Canada said. While 16.3 per cent of 15- to 19-year-olds said they could speak French in 1996, five years later only 13.5 per cent reported still speaking it.

The figures show Canada is not really bilingual at all, said Diane Lemieux, Quebec's minister responsible for the French language.

"It's not true that French and English co-exist as equals throughout Canada," she said. "The real solution is for Quebec to be a country."

Most new immigrants outside Quebec learn English as their second language, said Boyd. As Canada becomes more multilingual, there could be more demand for services in other languages.

"In the long term, with a population that starts to be sizeable in languages other than English and French, you might see a movement for multilingual policies.

"I don't see a backlash against bilingualism coming from allophones," she said. "I see a concern for providing services in a language they can understand."

That concern is known to the Toronto District School Board, where 52 per cent of students in secondary school and 47 per cent in elementary don't speak English as a first language, said board chair Donna Cansfield.

The board gets funding for three years of English as a second language training per student, but it takes five to seven years to become proficient in English, she said.

And there is no funding for students who were born here but don't speak English, or for a transition period for those who arrive with little or no schooling.

"It's a very, very significant challenge for teachers," she said.

Immigrants are badly needed in the economy, she said, "but we're not there for them when they arrive. I feel we just abandon these people when they come in."


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