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," ... "Through each census I could see the number of Mandarin speakers coming up,". On Wednesday, Statistics Canada released its 2021 census report on linguistic diversity and use of English and French in Canada... almost 280,000, or 4.5 per cent, consider Mandarin their mother tongue, meaning it is their first language learned at home in childhood...
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. Prior to the late 1960s, she said, the dominant language in Toronto's Chinatown was Taishanese, a Cantonese village dialect ... Then came waves of immigration from Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong, "so we started seeing the village dialect of Taishanese replaced by Cantonese," she said. A new wave from China began in the 1980s, she continued, "when China allowed its citizens to start leaving the country. So Hong Kong was replaced as the largest source of immigrants coming into Canada," ... Read more ...