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