n. & adj. — Ethnicities, occasionally derogatory
the mother tongue or native language of an immigrant to Canada that is neither English, French nor any of the 50+ Aboriginal languages that are native to Canada.
Type: 4. Culturally Significant — In 2011, speakers of immigrant languages made up more than twenty percent of Canada's population (20.6%), most living in large urban centres (see the Statistics Canada reference on "Immigrant Languages"). This percentage is similar to the number speaking French at 21% (down from 21.4% in 2006) (see the Statistics Canada reference on "Linguistic Characteristics"). As a consequence, and as a result of the strong Francophone component, English is spoken as a native language by about only 58% of the population (see "Linguistic Characteristics" reference), which is an anomaly among "Inner Circle" countries (Dollinger forthc.: section 1). The term is virtually synonymous with heritage language, which is a term that can be used to avoid any negative connotations that may be associated with the term "immigrant".