Canada is blessed with many excellent restaurants where one might overhear a non-official language spoken among staff. While the accommodation and food services sector ranked third in the number of workers using a non-official language at work in 2021, other languages, generally in combination with English or French, were also used by workers at hospitals, realtor offices, construction sites, farm fields or warehouses.
Nearly 670,000 people—or approximately 1 in 25 workers in Canada (3.9%)—used a language other than English or French at work in 2021. Among these workers, 546,000 used English or French at work in addition to a non-official language, while over 123,000 used only a non-official language.
It takes two to tango
The most widely known non-official languages in Canada are also among the most commonly used non-official languages at work.
In 2021, approximately 130,000 workers used Mandarin at work, while 102,000 used Punjabi, 83,000 used Cantonese, and 81,000 used Spanish.
Approximately one in four Canadians workers who reported knowing Mandarin (28.7%) or Cantonese (24.8%) during the 2021 Census of Population also reported using the language at work, the highest shares among the languages examined. Korean followed, with 22.8% of workers who reported knowing the language also reporting using it at work.
Although Spanish was the most reported non-official language spoken during the 2021 Census of Population, just over 1 in 10 reported speaking the language at work (11.8%).
Among the most commonly known non-official languages, Romanian (3.2%), Gujarati (3.5%) and Bengali (3.9%) ranked among the least spoken languages at work.
Where non-official languages are spoken at work
In 2021, the sectors with the highest proportion of workers using a non-official language at work were accommodation and food services (7.3%), real estate and rental and leasing (7.0%), and agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting (5.8%).
The sectors with the highest numbers of workers using a non-official language at work were health care and social assistance (74,200 workers), retail trade (71,200 workers) and accommodation and food services (62,900 workers).
The likelihood of speaking a non-official language at work may be related to the concentration of workers from the same country in a specific sector. For example, Tagalog was the non-official language most spoken in the health care and social assistance sector at the time of the 2021 Census of Population, which is perhaps not surprising given that one in six Filipinos in the workforce (or nearly 100,000 people) were employed in the sector.
Cantonese, Vietnamese and Korean were mainly used in the accommodation and food services sector, while Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic, Hindi and Gujurati were mainly used in retail trade.
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Contact information
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