Nine out of 10 people speak English or French most often at home. Most other languages are not spoken at home nearly as frequently as they are reported as mother tongue.

The 2001 Census showed that 22.0% of the population spoke French most often at home at the time of the census, slightly lower than the 22.9% who reported it as their mother tongue.

The proportion of the population that spoke English most often at home, 67.5%, was appreciably higher than the proportion whose mother tongue was English (59.1%). This was due to the attraction of English for members of other language groups. Even in Quebec, where anglophones represent a minority, the same situation prevails.

Only 10.5% of the population spoke a non-official language most often at home, far lower than the 18.0% who reported a non-official language as mother tongue. These individuals adopted one or the other official language as home language. Generally speaking, the longer immigrants stay in Canada, the more likely they are to speak English or French at home.

The 2001 Census reaffirmed the position of Chinese as Canada's third most common mother tongue.

Almost 872,400 people reported Chinese as their mother tongue, up 136,400 or 18.5% from 1996. They accounted for 2.9% of the total population of Canada, up from 2.6% five years earlier. Italian remained in fourth place, and German fifth, although their numbers declined. Punjabi moved into sixth, and Spanish slipped to seventh.

Language groups from European countries still made up the majority of the allophone population. However, the population of these groups is much older, and therefore, their numbers continued to decline.

Allophone groups from Asian and Middle Eastern countries recorded the largest increases in numbers. In addition to Chinese, the language groups which reported the largest gains in numbers since the 1996 Census were Punjabi, whose numbers increased by 70,200, or 32.7%; Arabic, which increased by 54,400, or 32.7%; Urdu, which rose by 43,100, to almost double its 1996 level; and Tagalog, up 41,600 or 26.3%. 

These five groups accounted for about one-third of the country's total allophone population in 2001. In British Columbia, these five accounted for one-half of the allophone population, and in Ontario and Alberta, they formed about 30%.

Nationally, the number of individuals reporting Italian, Ukrainian, German, Polish and Dutch as mother tongue all declined.