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Highlights
• The linguistic
make-up of Canada has been greatly influenced by immigration, which
increased the number of Canadians with a non-official language as mother
tongue in the short term and led to growth in the Anglophone population
in the longer term.
• The percentage of
Canadians with English 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
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.
• Canadians with a
non-official language as mother tongue represented 15% of the population
in 1991, up from 12% in 1951.
• The non-official
languages reported as mother tongue changed considerably over the
forty-year period. Ukrainian and German were replaced by Italian and
Chinese as the most frequently reported mother tongues.
• Among the
non-official languages that Canadians can speak, Italian, German,
Chinese and Spanish are by far the most common, with Spanish the most
frequently learned second language.
• 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, while the proportion rose from 12% to 16%.
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