Article content

Edmonton is fast becoming one of Canada’s most linguistically diverse big cities, with more people speaking languages such as Tagalog, Punjabi and Arabic than ever before.

New census data Wednesday shows the number of people in Edmonton who use a language other than English or French as their mother tongue surged 31 per cent between the 2011 and 2016 censuses — a faster rate than in any of Canada’s other big cities.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Edmonton leads Canada in immigrant-language growth Back to video

More than 345,000 Edmontonians claim a non-official first language, nearly double the number of the 1996 census and making up around a quarter of the metro area’s 1.3 million people. Of those, 87,115 regularly speak an “immigrant language” at home, according to Statistics Canada.

“Recent immigrants continue to change the linguistic landscape of the province. That’s not a surprise,” said Alison Yacyshyn, a professor at Concordia University of Edmonton. “We see this when we’re out in the community … we hear people talking different languages in our neighbourhoods.”