Browsing around for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) data, I stepped into their portal and stumbled across some updated “facts and figures” data on immigrant intake for permanent residents from 2007 to 2016. Tables included intake by nationality (15) and mother tongue (22).  Playing around with the data, I was struck by the way these two variables overlapped, but did not quite match. Pretty cool! So I thought I’d show off the matches for the BIG THREE Canadian migrant-sending countries: India, the Philippines, and China (in that order).

But first, it’s worth noting that the hold of the big three wavered in 2016. In a dramatic move, the upstart, Syria, actually knocked off China for third place sending country. This, of course, reflected a very real (and very welcome!) move on the part of Canada to accept Syrian refugees. Canada has taken in no where near as many Syrian refugees as many other countries, especially those nearby (Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan) and Germany. But credit where it’s due, Trudeau’s Liberals stepped up to their campaign promises to do something to help.

Aside from the sudden rise of Syria, the big three continue to dominate migration to Canada, trading off for first place, though China has dropped considerably since 2013. Pakistan rounds out the top five in 2016, and I promise I won’t leave it behind.

So what about mother tongues! How do they match to nation-states?

Let’s start with China. While there are many dialects of Chinese, all are treated as Chinese by IRCC. When we map Chinese as mother tongue onto China as a sending country, we actually see more Chinese-speakers entering Canada than arrive from the People’s Republic of China (a.k.a. Mainland China). When we add in arrivals from Taiwan and Hong Kong, we’re very near total arrivals speaking Chinese as their mother tongue. Nevertheless, there are still a few Chinese-speakers to spare! The Chinese diaspora extends to other countries (e.g. Singapore), so this makes sense.

Let’s look at the Philippines! This was actually the case that motivated my post, insofar as I saw Ilocano listed as one of the top 25 mother tongues of arrivals to Canada in 2016, and in my ignorance, I must confess that I had never heard of the language before. If wikipedia is to be believed, it’s the third-most spoken language in the Philippines, after Tagalog (which I knew) and Cebuano (which I did not know). Unfortunately, only Tagalog and Ilocano are recorded as mother tongues in the top 25 for immigrants to Canada. But let’s see how well they cover arrivals from the Philippines…

It looks like Tagalog is the mother tongue for the vast majority of immigrants from the Philippines, but recently Ilocano has been added. A number of other Filipino languages probably make up the balance (there are twelve indigenous languages listed as per wikipedia, and English and Spanish are also commonly spoken). Though Tagalog is dominant, Tagalog alone will not catch all immigrants from the Philippines. Good to know!

What about India? Holy smokes! Talk about complicated! Due to the partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan (and then Bangladesh), there’s simply no easy way to contain languages within India. At the same time, there are a LOT of languages to deal with. Here I chart India, Pakistan and Bangladesh together against the many subcontinent languages to make up the top 25 for immigrants to Canada.

Once again, it’s a pretty good match. In the early years, it appears some migrants speaking the subcontinental languages involved arrive from outside India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sri Lanka accounted for some of the Tamil-speaking migrants. More recently, it would appear I’m still missing some mother tongues by only tracking the languages in the top 25. India is a motherland with a lot of mother tongues!

What I also find intriguing is that the linguistic variation in migrants does not track the overall prevalence of languages in each sending country. What’s going on? Linguistic selection! We can see this especially insofar as Canada constitutes a real destination for Punjabi migrants from India. We can also see this insofar as the Philippines is increasingly sending migrants speaking its third (but not second) most common mother tongue. And of course selection has long been an issue for Chinese dialects (For instance, Cantonese is only now being replaced by other dialects here in Vancouver).