DO YOU SPEAK CANADIAN?

In our early years in Canada, we met a lady who said, right off the bat, “I don’t speak Indian”. We could communicate in English, I assured her, and held back from informing her that “Indian” wasn’t a language. It was too early in the relationship to take such liberties!

Of South Asian origin, born and raised in Canada, she was fluent in English and French. Many kids in families that have moved away from their home countries lose their mother tongues, but I hope they at least know the name of the language they don’t speak. Gujarati, Punjabi, Hindi, Bangla or Tamil, or any one of the many, many languages that are spoken across India.

But then many of us club languages spoken across China under “Chinese,” too, despite the fact that there is no such language. Mandarin and Cantonese, to name just the two main ones, are what people from China likely speak. While watching the Nicole Kidman-Sarayu Blue starrer Expats, I found it interesting that the subtitles mentioned Cantonese very often, and Mandarin rarely. Looking up languages spoken in Hong Kong, where it is set, I learnt that Cantonese is the main one, followed by Hakka, Mandarin, etc. 

Just look at it another way and you’ll see that saying “I don’t speak Indian” is like saying “I don’t speak Canadian”! Think of the vast number of languages spoken by people who identify as Canadian.

According to Statistics Canada, while English and French remain by far the most commonly spoken languages in Canada, aside from these, Mandarin and Punjabi were the country’s most widely spoken languages.

The 2021 Census also found that 4.6 million Canadians speak predominantly another language at home, and 4 in 10 people could conduct a conversation in more than one language.

The number of Canadians who spoke predominantly a South Asian language such as Gujarati, Punjabi, Hindi or Malayalam grew significantly from 2016 to 2021.

Other languages spoken predominantly at home also grew rapidly, including the East African language Tigrigna, Turkish, Tagalog, Persian languages and Spanish, Italian, Polish and Greek.

And that’s not counting the original “Canadian” languages. In 2021, 189,000 people reported having at least one Indigenous mother tongue with Cree languages and Inuktitut being the main Indigenous languages spoken in Canada.

Many of the languages spoken across the world borrow words from each other and make them their own. English, which is spoken in almost all corners of the world in one form or another, has done so liberally. Words from Indian languages are now part of pukka English. As are words from French, German, or Persian.

Learning about other languages opens new doors.

In Ukrainian, for instance, chai, kishmish and halwa mean exactly what they do in Hindi!

So invite a friend over for halwa, chai and a chat in “Canadian” and see where the conversation takes you!

Shagorika Easwar