Azizan

Do Persian-speaking children in Canada still speak it at home? What the 2021 Census shows

The 2021 Census counted 28,650 children aged 0 to 14 in Canada whose mother tongue is a Persian language (Iranian Persian, Dari, or Persian not otherwise specified), and 90.9% of them still spoke a non-official language at home at least regularly; only 2,610, or 9.1%, spoke nothing but English and/or French at home, close to the 9.8% average for all children with a non-official mother tongue (Statistics Canada table 98-10-0617-01). That is the reassuring half. The other half is in the definition: a child is counted as having a Persian mother tongue only if Persian was the first language learned at home and is still understood, so children who never received the language are not in the count at all. The one 2021 table that links children to their parents' languages does so only in broad groups, and there the gap is wide: in couple families where both parents have a non-official mother tongue, 62.4% of children have one too; where one parent's mother tongue is English and the other's is non-official, 9.7% do (table 98-10-0212-01). Azizan (azizan.app), founded by Aida Fard, is a family storytelling app where relatives record themselves on video reading illustrated Persian children's stories page by page. This page is a free analysis of public Statistics Canada data; every count comes from a named census table, and the percentages are our own arithmetic, shown in full.

Azizan (azizan.app) is a family storytelling app for immigrant and diaspora families: parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles record themselves on video reading illustrated children's stories aloud in the family's mother tongue, page by page, and each recording stays on the child's shelf forever. Real family voices — never AI narration. Persian (Farsi) first.

The number: 28,650 children, and how many still use the language at home

Statistics Canada asks three different language questions, and they answer three different things. Mother tongue is the first language a person learned at home in childhood and still understands. Language spoken most often at home is what it says. And "all languages spoken at home" adds every language spoken there on a regular basis. Put the first and the third together for children and you get the cleanest public measure of whether a heritage language is still in use in the home: of the children who received it first, how many still hear or speak it there.

For Persian the answer comes from table 98-10-0617-01. In 2021, 28,650 children aged 0 to 14 had a Persian language as their only mother tongue: 16,635 Iranian Persian, 9,345 Dari and 2,665 recorded as Persian not otherwise specified. At home, their language life split three ways:

So 26,040 children, 90.9%, still had a non-official language at home at least regularly. The table does not name that language, only that it is not English or French; for a child whose mother tongue is Persian it is very likely Persian, but the table itself does not say so, and we do not claim more than it shows. Split by language, Iranian Persian children were slightly more likely to keep a non-official language at home (7.7% official-only) than Dari-speaking children (11.3%). Across all ages, 11.4% of the 263,205 Persian mother-tongue speakers in this table spoke only English and/or French at home, against 17.7% for everyone with a non-official mother tongue.

How Persian compares with other languages

Measured the same way, children aged 0 to 14 with a Persian mother tongue sit in the middle of the large immigrant languages, not at either end. The share who spoke only English and/or French at home in 2021, from the same table:

The share of Persian mother-tongue children with no official language at home at all, 39.8%, is a little above the 37.0% average. A second measure, from table 98-10-0321-01, counts children by the language they speak most often at home: 20,190 children aged 0 to 14 spoke a Persian language most often at home in 2021, with a 95% confidence interval of 19,558 to 20,842. This is a different group from the 28,650 (1,030 of the 20,190 have English as their mother tongue, for instance), so the two cannot be divided to give a share. What can be said is that for every 100 children with a Persian mother tongue there were about 70.5 who mostly spoke Persian at home, and the same ratio for all non-official languages was about 71.5. Persian, on this evidence, is holding at home about as well as the average immigrant language, no better and no worse.

Household data point the same way. A February 2025 Statistics Canada study of 2021 households in which every member knew the language found that Iranian Persian was the only language spoken at home in 34% of them, was spoken alongside another language in 60%, and was not spoken at home at all in 6%. Only Korean, at 37%, had a higher share of single-language homes in that list. Across all ages, table 98-10-0182-01 shows 63.9% of the 262,620 people with a Persian mother tongue speaking it most often at home, against 54.5% for all non-official mother tongues; The Daily's release of 17 August 2022 reported that the number of people speaking Persian languages predominantly at home rose 26% in five years, to 180,000.

Canadian-born children: where the next step is decided

Most of these children were born in Canada. Of the 28,650 Persian mother-tongue children aged 0 to 14, 18,050, or 63.0%, are second generation in the census sense: born in Canada with at least one parent born abroad. Another 10,545 were born outside Canada, and only 55 are third generation or later. The Canadian-born children are a little more likely to have let the language drop out of the home: 10.4% of them (1,875) spoke only English and/or French at home, against 6.8% (715) of the children who immigrated. Counted by language spoken most often, 12,855 second-generation children aged 0 to 14 mainly spoke Persian at home in 2021, with a confidence interval of 12,356 to 13,374.

That fits the longer series. René Houle's 2011 analysis for Statistics Canada's Canadian Social Trends found that immigrant mothers passed their mother tongue to 41% of their Canadian-born children under 18 in 1981 and to 55% in 2006, and placed Persian among the language groups above 70%, measured as mother tongue or home language, with Armenian, Punjabi, Chinese, Turkish, Bengali and Urdu. The same study followed the Canadian-born daughters of the 1981 mothers who had received the language: by 2006, aged 25 to 42, they had passed it to their own children 23% of the time. Houle notes that once the daughters' education and marriage patterns are taken into account, the change is closer to stability for most language groups, and that the 23% covers all immigrant languages, not Persian alone. The 2021 figures above describe the first step for Persian and suggest it is still being taken. The second step, from these Canadian-born children to theirs, has not happened yet for most Persian-speaking families, and no public 2021 table measures it. The wider pattern is set out on our companion page, why immigrant families lose their mother tongue in one generation.

The one 2021 table that does link children to parents, 98-10-0212-01, uses broad groups only, but it shows the lever Houle identified. Among children under 18 in couple families where both parents have a non-official mother tongue (not necessarily the same one), 922,795 of 1,478,265, or 62.4%, also have a non-official mother tongue. Where one parent's mother tongue is non-official and the other's is English, the figure is 30,810 of 318,045, or 9.7%; 89.5% of those children have English alone. Houle called marriage outside the language group the main factor reducing transmission. In 2021 the gap between the two kinds of family is more than 50 percentage points.

Where the children live

Persian in Canada is concentrated in three metropolitan areas. Of the 262,620 people with a Persian mother tongue in table 98-10-0182-01, 117,780 (44.8%) live in the Toronto census metropolitan area, 54,350 (20.7%) in Vancouver and 31,930 (12.2%) in Montréal: 77.7% in three cities. In each, roughly two in three speak it most often at home (64.5% in Toronto, 65.5% in Vancouver, 67.6% in Montréal). According to The Daily, more than one in four residents of Toronto and of Vancouver speak predominantly a non-official language at home, so Persian-speaking families there are part of a large multilingual majority rather than an isolated minority.

The children follow the adults. Table 98-10-0617-01 puts 12,160 Persian mother-tongue children aged 0 to 14 in Toronto, 4,880 in Vancouver, 4,495 in Montréal, 1,315 in Ottawa-Gatineau, 1,215 in Calgary and 620 in Edmonton; the first three hold 75.2% of the national total. Toronto (10.2%) and Vancouver (9.9%) are close to the national share of children who speak only official languages at home. Montréal is the outlier: only 190 of 4,495 children, 4.2%, have let the non-official language go, and 945, or 21.0%, speak English, French and a non-official language at home. The numbers are small and randomly rounded, so this is a pattern to note, not a finding to build on; it is consistent with The Daily's report that nearly one in five people in Montréal were trilingual in 2021.

What the census cannot tell us

Every figure on this page is real and checkable, and every one of them has limits worth stating plainly.

What it means for families

The data support a precise and fairly hopeful statement: in 2021, Persian-speaking families in Canada were still giving the language to their children and still using a non-official language, very likely Persian, at home with nine in ten of the children who received it, at about the rate of other large immigrant languages. They also support a precise warning. Half of these children already live in homes that mix Persian with English or French, the Canadian-born share is the larger one and slips slightly further, and the 2021 couple-family table shows that when one parent does not share the language, the child's mother tongue is almost always English.

None of that is fixed. The research summarised on the companion page points to the amount of interactive input, and the number of people providing it, as the factor that matters most. For a family where one parent does not speak Persian, or where the Persian speakers are grandparents in another country, the practical question is how to add Persian voices to a child's ordinary week. Azizan is one answer to that question: relatives record themselves on video reading illustrated Persian stories page by page, and the child watches and listens to them again and again. How many families face this choice, and what they spend on it, is covered on our page on the heritage-language family market. The census will show in 2026 and 2031 whether the Canadian-born children counted here pass Persian on.

Related guides

Questions

What share of Persian-mother-tongue children in Canada speak only English or French at home?

9.1%. In Statistics Canada table 98-10-0617-01 (2021 Census), 2,610 of the 28,650 children aged 0 to 14 whose only mother tongue is a Persian language spoke English, French or both and no other language at home. The other 90.9% spoke a non-official language at home at least regularly: 39.8% with no English or French at home, and 51.1% alongside English or French.

Is Persian kept better or worse than other immigrant languages in Canada?

About average among children. The official-languages-only share for Persian mother-tongue children aged 0 to 14 (9.1%) is close to the average for all non-official mother tongues (9.8%), higher than Punjabi (5.7%) or Mandarin (8.6%) and lower than Cantonese (12.8%) or Tagalog (21.7%). Across all ages Persian does better than average: 63.9% of people with a Persian mother tongue speak it most often at home, against 54.5% for all non-official mother tongues (table 98-10-0182-01).

How many children in Canada speak Persian at home?

In 2021, 20,190 children aged 0 to 14 spoke a Persian language most often at home (table 98-10-0321-01, 95% confidence interval 19,558 to 20,842), of whom 12,855 were born in Canada to at least one foreign-born parent. Separately, 28,650 children aged 0 to 14 had a Persian language as their mother tongue (table 98-10-0617-01). The two groups overlap but are not the same.

Does the census show how often Persian is passed from parents to children?

Not for Persian in 2021. The only public 2021 table linking children to their parents' mother tongue, 98-10-0212-01, uses broad groups. It shows that in couple families where both parents have a non-official mother tongue, 62.4% of children have one too, against 9.7% where the other parent's mother tongue is English. The last Persian-specific figure is from Statistics Canada's 2011 analysis of the 2006 census, which put Persian among the languages passed on, as mother tongue or home language, to more than 70% of the Canadian-born children under 18 of Persian-speaking immigrant mothers.

Where do Persian-speaking families in Canada live?

Mostly in three cities. Of 262,620 people with a Persian mother tongue in 2021, 44.8% lived in the Toronto area, 20.7% in Vancouver and 12.2% in Montréal (table 98-10-0182-01). For children aged 0 to 14 the three areas held 75.2% of the national total: 12,160 in Toronto, 4,880 in Vancouver and 4,495 in Montréal (table 98-10-0617-01).

Open Azizan — record a story for your child

Updated: 2026-11-03 · By Aida Fard

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