Urdu, Punjabi among most spoken non-official languages in Canada

Punjabi is the fourth and Urdu is the seventh most widely spoken language — predominantly spoken at home — in Canada according to new data released by Statistics Canada (StatCan), the country’s data agency. This is based on the 2021 census.

Apart from English and French, Mandarin and Punjabi were Canada’s most widely spoken languages. About 4.6 million Canadians (12.7%) speak a language other than English or French predominantly at home. Mandarin and Punjabi are spoken predominantly at home by more than half a million Canadians each.

More than a hundred thousand people each speak Yue (Cantonese), Spanish, Arabic, Tagalog, Persian languages, Urdu, Russian and Korean at home as per the 2021 census.

According to the 2021 census, which was announced on August 18th, Urdu was at the seventh spot out of the top 12 non-official spoken languages in Canada.

In 2021, 520,000 Canadians spoke Punjabi at home, and 530,000 spoke Mandarin at home. According to the census, 290,000 people speak Arabic while 160,000 speak Urdu at home.

Meanwhile, conventional estimates indicate that the number of Pakistani-origin Canadians is a lot more than the official numbers. According to an official of the Pakistan High Commission in Ottawa, around 500,000 to 600,000 Pakistanis reside in Canada.