Multilingualism at York University

At the beginning of each semester, I give a survey to my students in which I ask them which languages they know. The question doesn't distinguish whether the language is a first or second or third language.

So far, 846 graduate and undergraduate students have answered the survey. Their responses show the linguistic diversity on campus and in the communities served by York University. 578 students (68.3%) stated that they speak a language other than English (many spoke more than one), listing 76 different languages overall. They are listed here.

To provide information about the languages, each language name links to a description of the language provided on the Ethnologue website.
Where a language name is written in CAPITALS, it indicates that the language is currently taught as a foreign language at York's Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics.

Not surprisingly, French is named the most often: 126 students claimed to speak French (15%). For comparison, according to the 2006 census, 8.3% percent of residents of the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area are reported to know French (422,940 out of 5 million people).

The eleven non-official languages with the most responses:

  1. SPANISH 66 (7.8%)
  2. RUSSIAN 51 (6.0%)
  3. URDU 39 (4.6%)
  4. ITALIAN 37 (4.4%)
  5. HEBREW 34 (4.0%)
  6. FARSI 30 (3.5%)
  7. ARABIC 28 (3.3%)
  8. CHINESE (Cantonese) 24 (2.8%)
  9. HINDI 24 (2.8%)
  10. GERMAN 22 (2.6%)
  11. JAPANESE 24 (2.6%)
Languages with 10-20 responses:
Polish 20, Panjabi 19, CHINESE (Mandarin) 17, GREEK 16, KOREAN 15, TAMIL 13, PORTUGUESE 13, Tagalog 12, Vietnamese 11.

Languages with 4-9 responses:
JAMAICAN CREOLE (Patois) 7, AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE 7, Serbian 7, Somali 7, Romanian 6, Gujarati 5, SWAHILI 5, Ukrainian 5, Filipino 4, Sinhalese 4, Bengali 4, Hungarian 4.

Languages with 3 or 2 responses:
Yoruba 3, Albanian 2, Armenian 2, CHINESE (variety not specified) 2, Croatian, Czech 2, Finnish 2, Malayalam 2, Norwegian 2, Pushto 2, Shona 2, Turkish 2.

Languages with 1 response:
Assyrian Aramaic, Azeri, Basque, Burmese, Bulgarian, Cambodian, Cebuano, CHINESE (Hakka), Ewe, Guayanese Creole, Harari, Igbo, Kapampangan, Kazakh, Lingala , Lithuanian, Luganda, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Ndebele, Nepali, Siswati, Slovak, Swedish, Tigrinya, Tshiluba, Wolof, YIDDISH, Zulu.

For comparison, the 2006 census reports that the following languages are the 10 most common "mother tongues" of residents of the Toronto area:

  1. Chinese (all varieties) 8.3% of total population
  2. Italian 3.8%
  3. Panjabi 2.7%
  4. Tagalog 2.2%
  5. Portuguese 2.2%
  6. Spanish 2.2%
  7. Urdu 2.1%
  8. Tamil 1.9%
  9. Polish 1.6%
  10. Russian 1.3%

Return to Philipp Angermeyer's page.
Last modified: 4/26/2011.