[URBAN NOTE] Toronto's language quilt
Jan. 29th, 2008 03:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI've been meaning for a while to blog about Catherine Farley and Damien Listar's maps of languages in Toronto, derived from the recent census. Published by the Toronto Star on the 30th of December, 2007, this map shows the most important languages ranking after English in the thousand or so census tracts in the Greater Toronto Area. In all, 56% of the Greater Toronto Area's population of 5.4 million claims English as a mother tongue, with Chinese languages ranking second at 6% of the population. Further behind are Italian, Punjabi, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, Urdu, Tamil, Polish, and Tamil, with speakers of French accounting for only 1.2% of the city's population.
In only three areas do speakers of languages other than English outnumber Anglophones: Punjabi-speakers in the satellite city of Brampton, Italian-speakers in suburban Woodbridge, and Chinese-speakers in the Scarborough community of Agincourt and neighbouring Markham just to that community's north. Other notable relatively concentrated language enclaves include speakers of Polish in southwestern Toronto and Mississauga, speakers of Portuguese to their east, speakers of Greek along the Danforth, Tamils in eastern Scarborough, Tagalog-speakers in the Regional Municipality of Durham, and Russophones along the Bathurst Corridor. The tract coloured light green in northern Pickering represents a relatively high concentration of Estonians--a quick googling does reveal an Estonian credit union in that city.
A twenty-megabyte downloadable PDF that contains a high-resolution version of the map is available here
In only three areas do speakers of languages other than English outnumber Anglophones: Punjabi-speakers in the satellite city of Brampton, Italian-speakers in suburban Woodbridge, and Chinese-speakers in the Scarborough community of Agincourt and neighbouring Markham just to that community's north. Other notable relatively concentrated language enclaves include speakers of Polish in southwestern Toronto and Mississauga, speakers of Portuguese to their east, speakers of Greek along the Danforth, Tamils in eastern Scarborough, Tagalog-speakers in the Regional Municipality of Durham, and Russophones along the Bathurst Corridor. The tract coloured light green in northern Pickering represents a relatively high concentration of Estonians--a quick googling does reveal an Estonian credit union in that city.
A twenty-megabyte downloadable PDF that contains a high-resolution version of the map is available here
