Northern Ontario cities becoming less multilingual

The proportion of non-official languages in the metropolitan regions of Greater Sudbury and Thunder Bay has declined over the last five years, new census data shows unlike other urban centres in the country where language diversity is growing.

English was identified as the mother tongue for 65.5 per cent of people in Sudbury and 85.7 per cent of people in Thunder Bay, Statistics Canada said Wednesday, as it released new information on languages from the 2011 census.

French, Canadas other official language, was cited by 27.7 per cent of Sudbury residents and 2.5 per cent of Thunder Bay residents.

A total of 6.7 per cent of Sudburys population and 11.8 per cent of Thunder Bays population has a mother tongue other than one of Canadas official languages a decrease from the 2006 census by 7.7 per cent and 13.3 per cent, respectively.

According to the 2011 census, the top five non-official languages spoken in Sudbury include Italian (1.8 per cent), Finnish (0.9 per cent), German (0.5 per cent), Ukrainian (0.4 per cent) and Polish (0.3 per cent).

The top five non-official languages spoken in Thunder Bay's metro areainclude Italian (2.7 per cent), Finnish (1.9 per cent), Polish (0.9 per cent), Ukrainian (0.8 per cent) and German (0.7 per cent). Within the city of Thunder Bay itself, Ojibway was listed as the mother tongue by 0.7% of thepopulation. That's an increase from 0.5% in the previous census.

In the census metropolitan area of Sudbury, a total of 120 languages were identified. In the census metropolitan area of Thunder Bay, a total of 114 languages were identified. In total, the 2011 census reported 191 different languages as mother tongues among the countrys population. Canada is one of the few countries in the world that counts language in its census.