Bilingualism is surging in Canada, but not necessarily in the country's two official languages.
Statistics Canada released the last batch of data from the 2011 census on Wednesday, this time focusing on about 200 languages that make up the linguistic portrait of the country.
The data suggest that multiculturalism is a reality for a growing number of families, even within the confines of their own homes.
The census shows that 17.5 per cent of the population - or 5.8 million individuals - speaks at least two languages at home.
That's up from the 14.2 per cent of multilingual households counted in the 2006 census, and an increase of 1.3 million people.
Of those 5.8 million, most of them speak English plus an immigrant language such as Punjabi or Mandarin. Less than a quarter - 1,387,190, to be precise - are using both French and English at home.
And aboriginal languages are in outright decline, with usage shrinking 1.7 per cent since 2006 - a loss of 3,620 people despite a concerted effort by many First Nations to revive their culture and language.
"Yes, we see a diversity, but what we see clearly is ... we have all these transition phases where English and French are also spoken at home in addition to nonofficial languages," said Jean-Pierre Corbeil, the agency's lead analyst on the languages part of the census.
"This doesn't happen only outside Quebec but in Quebec as well."
Judging by the data, Victoria is less diverse than many Canadian cities. A total of 85.4 per cent of residents reported English as their mother tongue. That was up slightly from the 2006 census.
The other top languages in the Victoria census metropolitan area: Chinese languages, 2.8 per cent; French, 1.9 per cent; German, 1.3 per cent; Punjabi, 1.1 per cent; Spanish, 0.8%, and Tagalog, the language of Filipinos, at 0.7 per cent.
Corbeil warned, however, that the data likely underestimate the increase in diversity over the past few years. That's because Statistics Canada had to change the way it collects language data after Prime Minister Stephen Harper scrapped the long-form census in 2010.
Wednesday's information came from the mandatory short form that went to every household in Canada. In the past, language was in the long form that went to 20 per cent of households, and was framed in a different context.
The 2011 census numbers suggest that language diversity has been increasing at just half the rate as noted in the 2006 census, but data from Citizenship and Immigration Canada suggests the pace of change is at least the same, Corbeil said.
The census shows that the most common immigrant language in Canada was Punjabi, reported by 460,000 people. When Punjabi speakers are grouped together with others who speak a closely related language such as Urdu, their numbers total 1,180,000.
Chinese languages are a close second, with a total of 1,113,000 people speaking Cantonese, Mandarin or other Chinese tongues.
Tagalog saw the biggest surge, growing by 64 per cent since the last census was taken in 2006.
Overall, Canada is home to 6.6 million people - one fifth of the entire population - who speak a language other than French or English. Two thirds of those have adopted French or English as a second language at home.
Official bilingualism, on the other hand, is not growing. About 17.5 per cent of people say they are able to conduct a conversation in both French and English - only a slight change from the 17.4 per cent rate noted in 2006.
