Mandarin now Toronto's 2nd-most common first language, reflecting years of demographic change

Toronto author and historian Arlene Chan has been expecting it to happen for years.

And with this week's census release, it finally did: Mandarin has edged out Cantonese as the second-most common first language in Toronto, after English. 

"I've been watching over the years, the slow increase," said Chan, who has written several books on the history of Chinese people in Toronto. 

"Through each census I could see the number of Mandarin speakers coming up," she told CBC News. 

On Wednesday, Statistics Canada released its 2021 census report on linguistic diversity and use of English and French in Canada. 

The report's numbers for Toronto's Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) — a vast geographic zone recognized by Statistics Canada that includes communities from Milton to Pickering and all the way up to Mono — paints a portrait of changing immigration patterns that have been decades in the making. 

Of that area's nearly 6.2 million inhabitants, almost 280,000, or 4.5 per cent, consider Mandarin their mother tongue, meaning it is their first language learned at home in childhood and still understood at the time the census was taken. 

Cantonese is close behind, with 4.3 per cent. 

Those numbers are in keeping with larger trends, with Statistics Canada reporting that there is an increasing diversity of languages other than English and French spoken in Canadian homes — with Mandarin in first place nationally as well. 

Looking back to 2016, the positions were reversed, with Cantonese speakers very slightly ahead of Mandarin speakers in the Toronto CMA.

Cast back even further and the gulf widens, with a Toronto report from 2006 describing two-thirds of the city's Chinese speakers as Cantonese, and just one-third as Mandarin. 

That makes sense, says Chan, based on who has been immigrating to Canada — and when.

Prior to the late 1960's, she said, the dominant language in Toronto's Chinatown was Taishanese, a Cantonese village dialect that Chan herself grew up speaking. 

Then came waves of immigration from Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong, "so we started seeing the village dialect of Taishanese replaced by Cantonese," she said.