Languages in Canada

Below is a map of the most common mother tongue other than English and French in each census subdivision or census tract of Canada. Move your mouse over or tap on a subdivision to see its name, percentage of native English and French speakers, the most commonly spoken language other than those two, and the percentage of people who speak that language. Numbers are derived from the 2011 Census, catalogue numbers 98-314-XCB2011016 and 98-314-XCB2011035 on the Statistics Canada website.

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The legend shows the most commonly seen languages in the map, which together account for just under 90% of all the subdivisions/tracts with language data. I chose the colours mostly by random-number generation. The abbreviation "n.o.s." stands for "no other specification".

The opacity of the shading is related to the percentage of people in the region who speak the language in question, with solid colour being used for anything over 20%. Note that when the percentage and population are low, it may be only one family in the subdivision speaking the language in question.

Statistics Canada introduces some deliberate random errors into its numbers for privacy purposes – there may be only one or two people in a particular region with some characteristic. I believe this is the cause of the occasional subdivisions where greater than 100% of the people report speaking either English or French. Note that the sum of English and French speakers may be legitimately greater than 100%, since some people are raised bilingual.

For the tracts, I combined the data across constituent census dissemination areas. In each of those dissemination areas, counts were rounded to a multiple of 5, so combining them may introduce errors, particularly when percentages are small.

I used the gcsd000b11a_e.shp and gct_000b11a_e.shp shapefiles available from Statistics Canada on this page, simplifying the geometries in QGIS to reduce the file size, and removing the subdivisions from the former where there was the more detailed tract data available.

Posted 2014-05-24,
updated 2014-06-01,
updated 2026-03-08 (removed Google Maps).