Mandarin and Punjabi are the most common non-official languages in Canada

More Canadians are speaking another language besides English and French than ever before.

Statistics Canada published its latest census and found that a record-breaking 40% of Canadians (roughly 4.6 million people) speak an additional language at home.

Since the last census in 2106, StatCan reported a large increase in Canadians who spoke South Asian languages such as Hindi, Malayalam and Gujarati.

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But Mandarin and Punjabi are the most common non-official languages, with more than a million people speaking at least one of those languages.

“The growth rate of the number of speakers of these languages was at least eight times larger than that of the entire Canadian population,” the report said.

Éric Caron-Malenfant, deputy head of the Centre for Demography at StatCan, said the trend is mainly driven by immigration. A quarter of the permanent residents who arrived in Canada from May 2016 to December 2020 were born in a South Asian country.

StatCan also revealed the number of people who speak an Indigenous language has dropped by almost 7%. There’s also been a decline in the number of people who speak certain European languages such as Italian, Polish and Greek.

English and French are still the dominant languages in the country.