Language in Canada

There are a multitude of languages spoken in Canada. Canada's two official languages are English and French. On July 7, 1969, under the Official Languages Act, French was made commensurate to English throughout the federal government. This started a process that led to Canada redefining itself as a bilingual and multicultural nation. According to the 2001 census, Anglophones and Francophone represent roughly 59.3% and 22.9% of the population respectively. The rest of the population represent persons whose mother tongues are Chinese, Italian, German, Aboriginal languages, or other. The following article refers to language by mother tongue unless otherwise specified.

Bilingualism

English and French have equal status in federal courts, Parliament, and in all federal institutions. The public has the right, where there is sufficient demand, to receive federal government services in either English or French. While multiculturalism is official policy, to become a citizen one must be able to speak either English or French and more than 98% of Canadians speak English or French or both. While the nation remains officially bilingual, the majority of Canadians are fluent only in English.

French is mostly spoken in Quebec with pockets in New Brunswick, eastern and northern Ontario, Saskatchewan, and southern Manitoba. In the 2001 census, 6,864,615 people listed French as a first language, of whom 85% lived in Quebec. 17,694,835 people listed English as a first language.

The official language of Quebec is French, as defined by the province's Charter of the French Language, which was introduced by the Parti Québécois in 1976. However, the Charter also provides certain rights for speakers of English and aboriginal languages. Quebec provides most government services in both French and English.

New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province, a status specifically guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Some provincial governments which are not officially bilingual, notably Manitoba and Ontario, offer services to their French minority populations.

All three territories recognize both English and French as official languages. Several aboriginal languages also have official status in Northwest Territories. Inuktitut is the majority language in Nunavut and also has official status there.

Francophones

Canada's francophones numbered some 6.9 million individuals in 2001. Of these, 85% resided in Quebec. There are also francophones communities, generally made up of ethnic French Canadians, in north and eastern Ontario and southern Manitoba, as well as influential communities of Acadians in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. In addition to francophones of French-Canadian origin, numerous francophones people from Haiti, Congo, Lebanon, Morocco, Rwanda, Syria, Algeria, France and Belgium have immigrated, particularly to Quebec and to francophone Ontario, and particularly since the 1960s. As a result of this wave of immigration, Canadian-born francophones are increasingly of diverse ethnic origins, although the French language's limited assimilative influence outside Quebec and some parts of Ontario and New Brunswick means that these subsequent generations tend to remain francophone only rarely in anglophone regions.

Constitutional basis of bilingualism

The principles of Bilingualism in Canada are protected in sections 16 to 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which establishes that:

French and English are equal to each other as official languages;
Debate in Parliament may take place in either official language;
Laws shall be printed in both official languages, with equal authority;
Anyone may deal with any court established by Parliament, in either official language;
Everyone has the right to receive services from the federal government in his or her choice of official language;
Members of a minority language group of one of the official languages if learned and still understood (i.e., French speakers in a majority English-speaking province, or vice versa) or received primary school education in that language has the right to have their children receive a public education in their language, where numbers warrant.

Other languages

Non-official languages are also important in Canada, with 5,470,820 people listing a non-official language as a first language. (The above three statistics include those who listed more than one first language.) Among the most important non-official first language groups are Chinese (853,745 first-language speakers), Italian (469,485), German (438,080), Punjabi (271,220) and Spanish 245,500.

Gaelic

Irish and Scottish Gaelic were spoken by many immigrants that settled in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. Newfoundland was the only place outside Europe to have its own Irish dialect, Newfoundland Irish, and the only place outside Europe to have its own distinct name in Irish, Talamh an Éisc, meaning 'land of the fish'. The Irish language is rare in Newfoundland now. In Nova Scotia, Scottish Gaelic still has 500-1,000 fluent speakers. Scottish Gaelic also mixed with Cree to form the Bungee language. At one point a motion was tabled in Parliament that Gaelic (Scottish Gaelic and Irish not having been seen as distinct at the time) be made the third official language of the Dominion, but did not pass.

Ukrainian

Canada is also home to a distinct dialect of the Ukrainian language, Canadian Ukrainian. It is spoken mostly in Western Canada by the descendants of first two waves of Ukrainian settlement in Canada who developed in a degree of isolation from their cousins in what was then Poland and the Soviet Union.

Aboriginal languages

Some members of the 900,000 Aboriginal people in Canada (3%) speak one or more of fifty different languages. The most important languages still used are Cree, Inuktitut, Ojibway, Innu, and Micmac. A 1996 census revealed that about 67.8% of Aboriginal people reported to be native English speakers. Nearly half (47%) of Aboriginal people in Quebec reported an Aboriginal language as mother tongue, the highest proportion of any province.

Hybrid languages

Michif and Bungay

Linguistic and cultural diversity on Canada's frontier in the West and in its early past in the Atlantic promoted the development of hybrid languages, most notably Michif, a Cree-Ojibwa-Assiniboine-French patois evolved within the Prairie Metis community, and also the less documented Bungie (also Bungy, Bungee, Bungay, a.k.a. the Red River Dialect), which is similar to Michif but confined to the Red River area of Manitoba and which is a mix of Cree and Scots Gaelic.

Basque pidgin

In the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Cartier's day the existence of a Basque pidgin has been established, apparently a mix of local Algonkian languages and Euskara (Basque)).

Chinook Jargon

In British Columbia, Yukon and throughout the Pacific Northwest a pidgin language known as the Chinook Jargon emerged in the early 19th Century which was a combination of Chinookan, Nootka, Chehalis, French and English, with a smattering of words from other languages including Iroquoian and Hawaiian thrown in. The Jargon had no fixed form, and — depending on the origin of the speakers and the locality — words from other languages were also incorporated: In the Puget Sound area of Washington, one account describes the adoption of the Norwegian/Scandinavian words glemde ("forgot") and husker ("remember"); in the writings of guide-outfitter Ted "Chilco" Choate, of Gaspard Lake in the Chilcotin Country, comments that Gaelic as well as Chilcotin were components of Jargon usage in that region, but does not provide any examples.

Chinook, as the Jargon is usually known, is normally considered an aboriginal language, but it was in its day the lingua franca of the Northwest Coast and Plateau and was often the language of workplace and home even in non-native environments. It was, in other words, a language of all peoples in the BC and the Pacific Northwest and was not exclusively native. So much so that during the colonial period of the 1860s a proposal to make it an official language was half-tabled in the colonial Legislative Assembly but was not passed, and in 1903 Richard McBride was recruited to run for the first-ever BC Conservative leadership in Chinook, so as to thwart eavesdropping by "Canadians", as people from Eastern Canada were still known at that time. Court proceedings involving natives were often in Chinook, and while court translators for Chinook were present, typically justices, magistrates and government agents themselves spoke passable Chinook.

On the other hand, efforts by the Diocese of Kamloops to separate their Catholic First Nations flock from the largely Protestant cultus whitemans (cultus means "bad, worthless, useless, ordinary") produced a separate script based on the French Duployan shorthand and a large amount of ecclesiastical translations as well as community bulletins of the diocese in a short-lived publication named the Kamloops Wawa ("talk from Kamloops"), and sermons were regularly delivered in Chinook at native churches throughout BC, even into the 1960s.

A darker side of the Jargon's role in native life is connected to the residential school systems, where the speaking of native languages was forbidden and rewarded with beatings. Despite this threat, First Nations children from all the cultures speaking the many different traditional languages in the province found they shared a common tongue in the Chinook, and it became the secret language of the schools - and punishable for being used, although only a few years before the churches running the schools had themselves used the Jargon in teaching and evangelical activities. Despite the Jargon being forbidden, its secretive use in the schools furthered its spread in the BC-wide native community as those children returned to their communities, often not knowing any of their traditional language and unable to communicate with parents and elders. The circumstances of Jargon usage in the schools also created a feeling among natives that it was their language, and as at the same time massive immigration to BC obliterated the old Jargon-speaking non-native culture, such that a linguistic divide was created where many non-natives speaking the Jargon or using Jargon words did not even know it was native in origin, and natives themselves preferred not to share it with outsiders because of its function as an intertribal language. By the mid-20th Century, Chinook was the dominant language among elders in most native communities and was a threat to the traditional languages. Because of this, the movement to restore the traditional languages has largely suppressed Chinook materials and, while many young natives can understand some of the Chinook, it has largely passed out of use.

Its widespread usage in the region left its impact on regional English, which still uses many Chinook words (skookum, saltchuck, tyee). Also notable are "Chinookisms", which range from borrowings such as "in the sticks" to a certain style of English delivery with simplified grammar. The evolution of slang terms such as "dumb-ass" may come from the Chinook hyas (big, important; found in English as "high-ass"), tenas (small, a child), tamanass (magic, spirits).

Demolinguistic descriptors

Mother tongue: The language spoken by the mother or the person responsible for taking care of the child is the most basic measure of a population's language. However, with the high number of mixed francophone-anglophone marriages and the reality of bilingualism and trilingualism, this description does not allow to fully determine the real linguistic portrait of Canada. It is, however, still essential, for example in order to calculate the assimilation rate.

Home language: This is the language most often spoken at home. This descriptor has the advantage of pointing out the current usage of languages. It however fails to describe the language that is most spoken at work, which may be a different language.

Knowledge of Official Languages: This measure describes which of the two official languages of Canada a person can speak informally. This relies on the person's own evaluation of his/her linguistic competence and can prove misleading. It was developed by Statistics Canada.

First Official Language Spoken: This is a composite measure of mother tongue, home language and knowledge of official language. It was developed by Statistics Canada.

Language composition

Of the 29.6 million citizens of Canada in 2001 (increasing to roughly 33 million in June 2006), 17.3 million are native English speakers, 6.7 million are native French-speakers and 5.2 million are native speakers of neither of Canada's two official languages. Another 380 thousand reported having more than one mother tongue.

Statistics Canada, 2001

English 17,352,315
French 6,703,325
Chinese 853,745
Italian 469,485
German 438,080
Punjabi 271,220
Spanish 245,500
English and a language other than French 219,860
Portuguese 213,815
Polish 208,375
Arabic 199,940
Tagalog 174,060
Ukrainian 148,090
Dutch 128,670
Vietnamese 122,055
Greek 120,365
English and French 112,575
Russian 94,555
Persian 94,095
Tamil 90,010
Korean 85,070
Urdu 80,895
Hungarian 75,555
Cree 72,800
Gujarati 57,555
Hindi 56,325
Croatian 54,880
Romanian 50,895
Serbian 41,180
French and a language other than English 38,630
Japanese 34,815
Bengali 29,505
Inuktitut 29,005
Armenian 27,350
Serbo-Croatian 26,690
Somali 26,110
Czech 24,790
Finnish 22,405
Ojibway 21,000
Yiddish 19,295
Turkish 18,675
Danish 18,230
Slovak 17,545
Macedonian 16,905
Khmer 15,985
Lao 12,945
Slovenian 12,800
Hebrew 12,435
Twi 11,070
English, French and another language 10,085

Geographic distribution

The population of Canada being unequally distributed throughout a vast territory, a look at the population of each of its ten provinces and three territories is helpful. The following table details the population of each province and territory by mother tongue.

Province/Territory	Total population	English	French	Other languages
Ontario	11,285,550	8,079,500 (71.6%)	493,630 (4.4%)	2,672,080 (23.7%)
Quebec	7,506,581	450 394 (6.0%)	5,577,877 (81.0%)	532,967 (7.1%)
British Columbia	3,868,875	2,865,300 (74.1%)	56,100 (1.5%)	939,945 (24.3%)
Alberta	2,941,150	2,405,935 (81.8%)	59,735 (2.0%)	469,225 (16.0%)
Manitoba	1,103,700	863,980 (75.8%)	44,775 (4.1%)	219,160 (19.9%)
Saskatchewan	963,150	825,865 (85.7%)	18,035 (1.9%)	117,765 (12.2%)
Nova Scotia	897,570	834,315 (93.0%)	34,155 (3.8%)	26,510 (3.0%)
New Brunswick	719,710	465,720 (64.7%)	236,775 (32.9%)	11,935 (1.7%)
Newfoundland	508,075	500,065 (98.4%)	2,180 (0.4%)	5,495 (1.1%)
Prince Edward Island	133,385	125,215 (93.9%)	5,670 (4.3%)	2,065 (1.5%)
Northwest Territories	37,105	28,985 (78.1%)	965 (2.6%)	7,065 (19.0%)
Yukon	28,525	24,840 (87.1%)	890 (3.1%)	2,700 (9.5%)
Nunavut	26,665	7,370 (27.6%)	400 (1.5%)	18,875 (70.8%)

Source: Statistics Canada, 2001 population census. (Figures combine single and multiple responses).

Protection of Minority Language Speakers

In Ontario, the French Language Services Act ensures that the province provides French speaking people with services in the French language.

In Quebec, the Charter of the French Language provides protections for Anglophone and Aboriginal minorities.

In Alberta, the Alberta School Act protects the right of French speaking people to receive school instruction in the French language in the province.

In Manitoba, the French Language Services Policy guarantees access to provincial government services in French, and various kinds of French-language education is provided. See Franco-Manitoban.

External links

Statistics Canada: Canadian Statistics: Population
The Atlas of Canada - Mother tongue
The Atlas of Canada - English-French Bilingualism
1996 Census: Aboriginal data
Population autochtone du Canada (in French)
Linguistic maps of Canada with 50 indigenous languages

Languages of Canada | Demographics of Canada | Kanadan kielet | Langues du Canada

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