Home to a plethora of established ethnic neighbourhoods —  including Chinatown, Little Italy, Little India, Greektown, Little Jamaica and Koreatown — Toronto has long been considered one of the most multicultural cities in the world. 

As of 2021, over 50 per cent of Toronto residents belong to a visible minority group, and approximately 200 different languages are spoken right here in the city, with more than 40 per cent of people speaking a mother tongue other than English or French. 

To give you an idea of just how linguistically diverse Toronto is, just take a look at these maps that identify the top nine mother tongues spoken in the city and where they are the most concentrated. 

The maps, created by cartographer Alex McPhee, were recently posted on X (formerly Twitter) and ignited lots of positive discussions about the city's diversity. 

The top 9 mother tongues in Toronto.

I have imagined also making a single poster that just shows 45 of these, would anybody be interested? pic.twitter.com/TxvRNYb1oQ

— Alex McPhee (@ksituan) June 10, 2024

With over 1.5 million native speakers (56 per cent), English obviously takes the top slot in Toronto, and as seen on the map, is dispersed quite equally throughout the city, despite some more concentrated pockets in the downtown core. 

In second place is Mandarin, with over 120,000 native speakers (4.3 per cent). Similar to Cantonese (which boasts 114,000 native speakers in Toronto), most native speakers are concentrated in and around Markham. 

Fighting it out for 9th place... I get to make the completely arbitrary call about whether to merge Persian, Farsi (counted separately!!!), and Dari.

— Alex McPhee (@ksituan) June 11, 2024

Other languages featured on the maps include Tagalog (106,265 speakers), Persian (48,920 speakers), Italian (58,045 speakers) Tamil (62,995 speakers), Spanish (87,715 speakers) and Portuguese (66,305 speakers). 

"That's what you get with the most culturally diverse city on the planet," one person wrote under the post. 

"I'd love to see one with 45 languages. I’m curious to see how many French speakers live here. Maybe it's because I'm mostly downtown, but I know a ton of people who also speak Japanese here," they continued. 

"What I'm surprised about is that Toronto has almost as many native Italian speakers per capita as Staten Island," another person joked. 

"This is awesome," one user commented, encouraging the original poster to create an interactive version of the map.