But Chinese Languages Together Make Up Much Bigger Number Than Punjabi!
Surrey is home to 94,000 South Asians who list Punjabi as their mother tongue – they make up 20 per cent of the city’s population and two-thirds of the Punjabi speakers in Metro Vancouver.
SURREY – Punjabi is the single most spoken second language after English in the lower mainland region with third of Metro Vancouverites speaking a language other than English most often at home, according to newly released census data.
Punjabi is the single most prevalent immigrant language in the region – accounting for nearly 147,000 speakers or 6.4 per cent of Metro Vancouver’s population of just under 2.3 million.
But Chinese languages make up much more if clumped together.
The census counted 133,000 Cantonese speakers (5.8 per cent), 92,000 Mandarin speakers (four per cent) and another 115,000 non-specifed Chinese speakers (five per cent) in Metro, reported the Surrey Leader newspaper.
Philipine-based Tagalog is Canada’s fastest-growing language and is now spoken by three per cent of Metro Vancouver’s population, while the next top languages here are Korean (two per cent), Farsi, Spanish, German and Hindi (1.1 per cent.)
Just 58 per cent of Metro Vancouver residents speak only English at home, down from 65.2 per cent in 2001.
Increasingly, Metro residents are speaking both English and their mother tongue at home – that mixed use was reported by 24 per cent, up from 17.8 per cent a decade earlier.
Nearly 130,000 residents, or 5.7 per cent of the Metro population, indicated they could not speak English, up from five per cent in 2006.
Surrey is home to 94,000 South Asians who list Punjabi as their mother tongue – they make up 20 per cent of the city’s population and two-thirds of the Punjabi speakers in Metro Vancouver.
Half of Metro’s 23,000 Hindi speakers also live in Surrey.
The census also counted 28,000 in Abbotsford-Mission whose mother tongue is Punjabi – 16.7 per cent of the population – while German was second at 6,500 or 3.9 per cent. Dutch, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese were next most common, at one per cent or less.
