English is the first official language spoken by the majority of Canadians, while French’s influence has gone down, according to census data released by Statistics Canada Wednesday. .The data said English is the first official language spoken by 75.5% of Canadians in 2021. This proportion increased from 74.8% in 2016. .It said French is the first official language spoken by an increasing number of Canadians, but the proportion fell from 22.2% in 2016 to 21.4% in 2021. .The number of Canadians who spoke French at home went up in Quebec, British Columbia, and Yukon, but decreased in other provinces and territories. .For the first time since the census started, the number of people in Quebec whose first official language spoken is English topped one million people. Their proportion of the population has risen to 13% in 2021. .The data said the proportion of bilingual English-French Canadians remained unchanged at 18%. The increase in the bilingualism rate in Quebec (44.5% to 46.4%) offset the decrease observed outside Quebec (9.8% to 9.5%). .The Official Languages Tracking Survey said in April one-third of English-speaking Canadians think it makes no sense to learn French. .READ MORE: Français? Non, merci.“Most Canadians continue to reject the idea that it is more useful for Canadian children to speak other languages such as Mandarin or Arabic than learning to speak both official languages,” said the Official Languages Tracking Survey..“While this sentiment is shared by both official language groups, there is a notable divide in how they respond to this question.”.Statistics Canada said one-quarter of Canadians had at least one mother tongue other than English or French and one-eighth spoke a main language other than Canada’s official languages, the highest numbers on record. .The number of Canadians who spoke a South Asian language such as Gujarati, Punjabi, or Hindi at home grew from 2016 to 2021, an increase fuelled by immigration. This growth was at least eight times larger than the overall Canadian population during this period..There was a decline in the number of Canadians who spoke European languages such as Italian, Polish, and Greek at home..The data said aside from English and French, Mandarin and Punjabi were Canada’s most common languages, with more than 500,000 people speaking each at home..Among Canadians whose mother tongue is not English or French, 70% spoke an official language at home at least on a regular basis.
