The Lower Mainland has a language problem.
The growing communication gap between immigrants and Anglophone Canadians continues to expand as the cultural and linguistic milieu of our “country of immigrants” increasingly reflects that of the entire world.
While the 2011 census found that the proportion of Metro Vancouver residents who have either English or French as a mother tongue has risen, in absolute terms, the number of people who don’t have knowledge of either language has risen 18% to 128,460 from 108,440 in 2006. And the number of people in Metro Vancouver who speak a non-official language at home has risen 6% to 582,115 from 547,660.
The shifting mix of immigrants from Asia has had a lot to do with the country’s linguistic diversity. According to data obtained from Citizenship and Immigration Canada, over the past decade, the bulk of immigrants coming to B.C. have originated from the world’s largest countries, with a quarter of them coming from the People’s Republic, 13.5% from India and 11% from the Philippines.
But clearly more needs to be done to bridge the language gap for new Canadians that are here. An important step would be to recognize their presence as an opportunity to broaden our collective skill set in alignment with the province’s goals of tapping Asian economic opportunities. (See “Yuen Pau Woo: Asian equations” – BIV issue 1183, June 26-July 2, 2012).
Kevin Rudd, former prime minister of Australia, noted his country has gained tremendously from embracing Asia as its home over the past 30 years, encouraging its youth over the past decade to learn one (or more) of the key languages of the region: Mandarin, Japanese, Indonesia or Hindi.
“If you produce from your universities a cadre of graduates of the future who are double disciplines, fantastic at what they do, but at the same time are competent in the language of the region, it puts them ahead of any European competitor or any competitor from the U.S.,” he told Vancouver business and community leaders at a conference organized by the Business Council of BC and the BC Chamber of Commerce.
“The assumption that English will be the global lingua franca by the end of this century is itself an arrogant assumption.” •
