French language in Canada

This article is about the historical and sociological aspects of the French language in Canada. For the variety of the French language in Canada, see Canadian French.

French is the mother tongue of approximately 7.8 million Canadians (19.6 percent of the Canadian population, second to English at 54.9 percent) according to the 2021 Canadian census. Under the 1969 Official Languages Act, French is recognized as an official language of Canada alongside English and both have equal status at the federal government level. Most native Francophones in Canada live in Quebec, the only province where French is the majority and the sole official language. In 2016, 29.8 percent of Canadians reported being able to conduct a conversation in French; this number drops to 10.3 percent of Canadians when excluding Quebec, since most of Canada outside this territory is Anglophone.

In Quebec, 85 percent of residents are native francophones and 95 percent speak French as their first or second language. About one million native francophones live in other provinces, most notably the neighbouring province of New Brunswick, where about a third of its residents are francophones; New Brunswick is Canada's only officially bilingual province. There is also a large community in Ontario, mainly concentrated in Quebec-bordering regions to the east of Ottawa and in Northeastern Ontario. Elsewhere in Canada, there are pockets of smaller francophone communities throughout including in Manitoba (notably the St. Boniface neighbourhood), Alberta, Saskatchewan, and the Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

The language is mainly spoken by Canadians of French descent (most notably the Québécois and the Acadians, with varying dialects), a legacy of the French colonization of America, and these communities maintain a distinct society and culture from the mainly anglophone rest of Canada. Outside of Quebec, where otherwise English is the de facto working language, francophone minority communities retain the right to French-language primary and secondary education as guaranteed by Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They also, in most territories, retain official rights for provincial level French-language services and institutions through constitutional provisions (Manitoba and New Brunswick) or statutory provisions in the legal system (Alberta, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Yukon). French speakers in Canada have been the subject of linguistic discrimination and have historically faced subjugation through laws such as Regulation 17. This has led to sometimes uneasy relations with the anglophone Canadian majority.

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