Languages spoken in Barrie

The census asks three different questions, and they give three different counts. A mother tongue is the first language learned at home in childhood and still understood. The language spoken at home is the one used most often there, or regularly beside it. Knowledge of a language means being able to conduct a conversation in it, however it was learned. A language can rank differently on each: Hindi is the mother tongue of 425 people in Barrie but 2,140 can converse in it.

French in Barrie, every measure of it and what the city offers in French, has its own page, in French: Les Franco-Ontariens à Barrie.

The ten largest of the other languages each have a short page written in that language: Español, Русский, Português, 中文, ਪੰਜਾਬੀ, Italiano, اردو, Polski, Tagalog, हिन्दी (all ten, and how they were chosen).

How many people in Barrie speak French?

Asked which official language they speak first (Statistics Canada derives this first official language spoken from the knowledge, mother tongue and home language answers), 142,165 Barrie residents answer English, 2,480 French and 455 both. 1,165 speak neither official language.

What other languages are spoken in Barrie?

Many of these languages are kept up at home. 10,305 people speak a non-official language most often at home (7.05%), against 131,565 for English. Among the languages with at least 300 mother-tongue speakers, the home-language count is closest to the mother-tongue count for Malayalam (75%), Mandarin (73%), Korean (73%), and furthest from it for Dutch (3%), German (12%), Italian (19%): speakers of those keep the language but mostly speak English at home.

Which languages can Barrie residents hold a conversation in?

Across Ontario 36.05% can converse in a non-official language; in Barrie 19.32%.

Indigenous and sign languages

125 Barrie residents can converse in an Indigenous language, most of them in an Ojibwe (Anishinaabemowin) language: 85, of whom 20 learned it as a mother tongue. Counts this small are rounded at random to a multiple of 5 and should be read as approximate. For scale, the same census counted 5,320 people in Barrie with an Indigenous identity.

240 people can converse in American Sign Language, and 50 use it most often at home. No other sign language was counted in the city.

What languages do Barrie residents use at work?

Of the 85,160 Barrie residents who had worked at some point since January 1, 2020, 84,015 used English most often at work (98.66%). 375 used French most often and 1,020 used both English and French at work. 485 worked mostly in a non-official language, Mandarin the most common of them.

Every other language

98 more languages the census counted in Barrie, by name.

Statistics Canada's own language names. "n.o.s." is not otherwise specified (Persian reported without saying which); "n.i.e." is not included elsewhere, a catch-all rather than one language. A zero means none counted after rounding, which is not the same as nobody.

What this page does not have yet

A comparison with the 2016 census. Statistics Canada's 2016 profile pages are behind a browser check this site's tools cannot pass, and the 2021 tables used here carry 2021 only. The 2026 census was taken in May 2026; its language figures replace these when Statistics Canada releases them.