International immigration strongly influence mother tongue proportion

Proportion of English speakers in B.C. decreases while non-official languages raises substantially, the international immigration seems like to be the main factor of these moves.


Canada is a bilingual country. The official languages ​​are English and French. However, the surge of immigration in past few years is bringing significant changes to the mother tongue proportion of British Columbia. According to data obtained from the Population by Mother tongue and Geography, 1951 to 2016 of statistic Canada, we all found English speakers in B.C decreased from 83% to 70% as shown chart above. While non-official languages such as Chinese, Indian, Korean, etc. raised substantially. Mother tongue proportion is affected by many factors, but immigration is the most influential one. I will extend the range of study into Canada whole country as chart below.





An article written by Jacques Henripin published Feb,7 2006 titled "Language in Use" listed three reasons why mother tongue proportion trend moves like that in Canada. The first is the arrival of immigrants who speak languages ​​other than English or French, which initially increased the size of the non-official language speakers population. Second reason was the adoption of English by their later generation. The last one shows French people tend to use English when living outside Quebec, Arcadia, and Ontario.

Another article in Research Data by SILOTA demonstrates that over 200 languages are spoken as a first language in Canada, that makes Canada become one of the most diverse countries in the world. In addition, about 80% of Canadians speak both English and French. It also examines Young people are increasing speaking more English than French. Since 1990, population growth in Canada is through immigration. Growing children are more likely to speak an immigrant language at home. One thing it mentioned about mother tongue in British Columbia is population of Punjabi speakers in British Columbia is on a rise, as each province shows a distinct immigrant language as the second most spoken language.

In the article "How immigrants keep their language alive in Canada" published in 2011 by René Houle, it discussed that while immigrant groups of origin European more difficulty in retaining their language, newer immigrant groups, such as those who speak Spanish, Chinese or Punjabi, are generally more tend to retain their own immigrant groups. There are Several factors influence whether immigrant languages ​​are passed down from generation to generation. The most important factor is whether the child get taught to these languages ​​in the family. From this perspective, most immigrants who have settled in Canada since World War II undoubtedly had a positive impact undoubtedly on the vitality of immigrant languages. That's how René explain the impacts of immigration languages.

Generally speaking, the impact of immigration is obvious and also indirectly related to the proportion of official languages. Like immigration leads a rise of non-official languages speakers such as Chinese, Indian which can directly influence a decline proportion of English speakers. Even so Canada diversity civilization and English and French language culture won't diminished.

Assignment 4: Data Update 3

1. Chart

2. Unanswered question

Question 1: We all know that Chinese, Indian, etc, these popular languages take big part of non-official mother tongues. Here's a question I'm interested in but cannot answer is what the detailed percentage of each other several non-official languages distribute, which can not figure out from this chart. To get the information I would need to know the percentage of each languages in different time frame.

Question 2: How is French as a official language keeping that low proportion for that long time between this 55 years.

3. How would you get the data?

In order to get the result of question 1 above, I have to know the agency which can count the population of the mother tongue speak, like government census and CIC statistics.

There I have two options to figure out this question. One's through Online statistics, which is gathering data from Statistic Canada if there has data set of population of each non-official languages, so that I can filter the data by my chart. The second way is providing a offer of request of population information from Citizenship and Immigration Canada. I don't even know how long will this take, it may takes a long time like one month at least. In this way we can get the latest information of this year.

These two ways are the most efficient methods I can provide. The most direct way to gain the data set is through census, while gathering information given by government can get the newest data.

As for method of second question, I guess I would also search for information online, such as statcan.gc.ca and clo-ocol.gc.ca. There must have reasonable explanation or data set which can help us for it.

Assignment 3: Data Update 2

Update 2

1. Lead:

This assignment demonstrates the trend how the proportion of English, French and Non-official languages shift. And reflect the immigration frequency in recent 50 more years. Here is the chart showed below which called Population percentage of different mother tongue in British Columbia from 1951 to 2016.

2. Excel Workbook Link and Explanation:

Link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1k2K4WtD5Ocg4ZiUx5tzY3NZtq9cJI7NVeQnlrzFH3Y4/edit?usp=sharing
Explanation: This data set looks at the population percentage of different mother tongue in British Columbia from 1951 to 2016. It differs into three mother tongues: French, English, Non-official Languages. The units in number are percentages. The raw data also have volume of each time period population. Due to the numbers of exact population are not that useful to evaluate,  I deleted the volume rows. 

3. Original Data set Link:

Click here to see original data set.

4. News Story/Study Link and Brief Summary:

Link: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-630-x/11-630-x2018001-eng.htm

Here is the new story/study of that I found for the assignment. In this study, it indicates the mother tongue of Canadian at the beginning of the 20th century are French and English.In 1901, about one in ten people declared their mother tongue as an indigenous or immigrant language. It was not until 1941 that the concept of mother tongue was defined in the Canadian Census, which was defined as the first language of childhood learning at home and can still be understood today.However, In the next 115 years, Canadian language features have become more diverse, the reason is there were more and more immigration and aboard students came to Canada. Thus the proportion of English and French speakers decreased.

Assignment 2: Data Update 1

Data Update 1

1. What data set will you use for your final report? (describe your data set, include a link to it and claim it at the URL above).

I'm going to use a data set named Air passenger traffic at Canadian airports, annual, which is from Statistics Canada.

URL:https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=2310025301

2. Describe the data set. What kind of data does it contain?

This data set was illustrated by several information: airport distribution, air passenger type, volumes and times. By using these information this table evaluate the volume of different type of air passengers in several area between 2014 to 2018.

3. Is there anything about your data that you don’t understand? (i.e. what a column heading means). How will you find this out?

No, I understand everything about this table. And I think all of this chart is simply comprehensive. 

4.What are some questions you hope to answer with your data? List at least three.

  a. Which airport has the most volume of domestic passengers in 2018?

  b. In which year Vancouver International airport had most trans-border passengers?

  c. How many passengers total in Calgary International airport at 2014?

This data set was illustrated by several information: airport distribution, air passenger type, volumes and times. By using these information this table evaluate the volume of different type of air passengers in several area between 2014 to 2018.

Assignment 1: Data Visualization Analysis

Assignment 1: Data Visualization Analysis

How many students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine from 2000-2018

Chart link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/local/school-shootings-database/?noredirect=on



This is a chart detailing the volume of student who have experienced gun violence at school in Columbine from 2000 to 2018. One dot in the tiny circle represents 10 children exposed to gun violence.Next I will analyze the pros and cons of this chart how it expresses data information.

First of all, this chart uses curve, circles dots and numbers to show population of students in situation, the advantages include: 1.Flexibility. This chart is obvious to see the differences between each period of years so that we can conduct the total trend of violation distribution in Columbine, also convenient for the viewer to interpret and compare its position and relationship between the two coordinates. 2.Convenience. Compare to other chart like bar chart, pie chart etc, this graph can easily details in much dimensions: time, schools, volume of target, and trends. This benefit can improve people's ability to understand data and make work much more efficiency.  The text in the chart is often used only to interpret or annotate the data. Less text makes the analysis result concise and clear. For example, in this chart the annotation like marjory stoneman Douglas High School annotates the highest volume of students experience gun violation at 2018 in columbine. these text obviously show the highlights in this graph.

However, this graph has a disadvantage. That is we are hard to evaluate exact volume of students in exact time spot and exact position. The reason is the dots are to tiny to recognize and count. You are supposed to amplification and count one by one if you need

precise statistics. For example, if someone ask me to evaluate the number of students who experience gun violation in Sandy Hook Elementary School at 2010 February, I can't tell immediately. This is the disadvantage called non-specific.

Overall, this graph is intuitive, vivid, makes complex statistics simple, popular, and visual, making it easy to understand and compare. It can visually display the statistical information attributes, the graphic structure that plays a key role in data understanding and intuitive visual perception.

Here is a link to my data set.