Global News published this video item, entitled “Record number of Canadians’ first language is not English or French” – below is their description.
English and French are still by far the most common languages in Canada, spoken by more than 90 per cent of its citizens.
But linguistic diversity is growing among Canadians, according to new data from Statistics Canada, with a record-high number of people primarily speaking languages other than English or French.
Roughly 9 million have a mother tongue that is not one of the two official languages, which is the highest number recorded since the question was first asked in 1901.
Tom Vernon looks at what’s fuelling the trend, and which languages are becoming more common in Canada.
Canada is a country in the northern part of North America. It extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering 9.98 million square kilometres (3.85 million square miles), making it the world’s second-largest country by total area.
Its southern and western border with the United States, stretching 8,891 kilometres (5,525 mi), is the world’s longest bi-national land border. Canada’s capital is Ottawa, and its three largest metropolitan areas are Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.
Various Indigenous peoples inhabited what is now Canada for thousands of years before European colonization. The Canada Act 1982, which severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the British Parliament. Canada is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy in the Westminster tradition, with a monarch and a prime minister who serves as the chair of the Cabinet and head of government.
As a highly developed country, Canada has the seventeenth-highest nominal per-capita income globally as well as the thirteenth-highest ranking in the Human Development Index. Its advanced economy is the tenth-largest in the world, relying chiefly upon its abundant natural resources and well-developed international trade networks.
A census is the procedure of systematically enumerating, and acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. This term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses include agricultural, traditional culture, business, supplies, and traffic censuses.
One of the world’s earliest preserved censuses was held in China in ad 2 during the Han Dynasty. The population was registered as having 57,671,400 individuals in 12,366,470 households.
