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.