Urdu and Punjabi Among Top 5 Most-Spoken Non-Official Languages in Canada

Punjabi and Urdu have been ranked among the top five most spoken non-official languages in 2021 in Canada.

According to data from Census 2021 released by Statistics Canada earlier this week, Punjabi is placed second after Mandarin in the most spoken non-official languages in Canada, while Urdu is ranked fifth on the list.

The census showed that around 4.6 million Canadians predominantly speak a language other than the official languages – English or French – and this population makes up 12.7 percent of Canada’s total population, which has been growing for 30 years.

Mandarin and Punjabi are the two most widely spoken languages in the country, and their numbers have grown remarkably, with the former going from about 610,000 speakers in 2016 to 730,000 in 2021 and the latter going from 543,000 speakers to 763,000.

Even though the number of Mandarin speakers spiked between 2016 and 2021, the growing number of Punjabi speakers has surpassed it.

Other South Asian languages that people termed as their mother tongue experienced significant growth as well. These included Hindi, which surged from 133,000 speakers to 224,000, Tagalog from 510,000 speakers to 590,000, and Urdu from 243,000 speakers to 297,000.

As per the statistics, the number of Canadians who spoke Gujarati, Punjabi, Hindi, or Malayalam as their first language increased dramatically between 2016 and 2021, which can be attributed to immigration. The population growth rate of people who spoke one of these languages was at least eight times higher than the overall population of Canada, during the mentioned period.

Meanwhile, conventional estimates indicate that the number of Pakistani-origin Canadians is a lot more than the official numbers. According to an official of the Pakistan High Commission in Ottawa, around 500,000 to 600,000 Pakistanis reside in Canada.

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