How many people speak French in Ontario?
North America
The French language has historically played a significant role in North America and now retains a distinctive presence in some regions. Canada is officially bilingual. French is the official language of the Province of Quebec, where 95% of the people speak it as either their first or second language, and it is co-official with English in the Province of New Brunswick. Other French-speaking locales include the Province of Ontario (the official language is English, but there are an estimated 600,000 Franco-Ontarians), the Province of Manitoba (co-official as "de jure" with English), the French West Indies and Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, as well as the US state of Louisiana, where French is also an official language. Haiti is included with this group based on historical association but Haitians speak both Creole and French. Similarly, French and French Antillean Creole is spoken in Saint Lucia and the Commonwealth of Dominica alongside English.
Penetanguishene
The town has a significant concentration of Franco-Ontarians. It is one of only three communities in Central and Southwestern Ontario where the population of francophones exceeds the provincial average of five percent, the other two being Welland and Lakeshore. The town is also 12.6% Métis, compared to the provincial average of 0.6%.
French diaspora
Canada has the second largest community of people outside of France who have identified as being of French descent, close behind the United States. 8.5 million Canadians claim French heritage. The French-speaking province of Quebec has the highest concentration of people with French ancestry in the world: 90% of Quebecers have French roots. They are also found in large numbers in the province of New Brunswick where a third of the population can trace their roots back to France and in Ontario which is home to the second largest community of French Canadians in the country.
History of French
During the 17th and 18th centuries, the French language established itself permanently in the Americas. There is an academic debate about how fluent in French the colonists of New France were. While less than 15% of colonists (25% of the women – chiefly "filles du roi" – and 5% of the men) were from the region of Paris and presumably spoke French, most of the rest came from north-western and western regions of France where regular French was not the primary native language. It is not clearly known how many among those colonists understood French as a second language, and how many among them – who, in overwhelming majority, natively spoke an oïl language – could understand, and be understood by, those who speak French thanks to interlinguistic similarity. In any case, a linguistic unification of all the groups coming from France happened (either in France, on the ships, or in Canada) such that, according to many sources, the then "Canadiens" were all speaking French (King's French) natively by the end of the 17th century, well before the unification was complete in France. Canada's reputation was to speak as good French as Paris did. Today, French is the language of about 10 million people (not counting French-based creoles, which are also spoken by about 10 million people) in the Americas.
Franco-Ontarian
Ontario now has eight French-language Roman Catholic school boards and four French-language public school boards. Each of these school boards serves a significantly larger catchment area than an English-language school board in the province, due to the smaller francophone population.
Uxbridge, Ontario
English is the mother tongue of 91.7% of the population, whereas French, the other official language, of 1.0%. German is the mother tongue of 1.4% of the residents of Uxbridge, while native speakers of Italian make up exactly 1.0% of the population.
Northern Ontario
The mining boom of the early twentieth century attracted many francophones to Northeastern Ontario, and French is still widely spoken there. While the Canadian constitution never required the province of Ontario to recognize French as an official language, the government provides full services in the French language to any citizen, resident, or visitor wishing it including communications, schools, hospitals, social services, and in the courts, under the French Language Services Act of 1986. Bilingualism is higher than the Canadian average – in 2011, 180,020 people, or 24.6% of the population, spoke both English and French. There were also 8,910 people, or 1.2% of the population, who only spoke French. All of Northeastern Ontario, with the technical exception of Manitoulin Island, is designated as a French language service area, as are a few individual municipalities in the Northwest; Manitoulin Island, while not officially designated as a French language service area, effectively functions as one anyway since it receives most provincial government services from the designated Sudbury District seat in Espanola rather than functioning as its own jurisdictional area.
Geographical distribution of French speakers
French is the second most common language in Canada, after English, and both are official languages at the federal level. French is the sole official language in the province of Quebec, being the mother tongue for some 7 million people, or almost 80.1% (2006 Census) of the province. About 95% of the people of Quebec speak French as either a first or second language. New Brunswick and Manitoba are the only officially bilingual provinces, though full bilingualism is enacted only in New Brunswick, where about one third of the population is Francophone. French is also an official language of all of the territories (Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Yukon). Out of the three, Yukon has the most French speakers, comprising just under 4% of the population. About 6,827,860 Canadians speak French as their first language, or around 20% of the country, with 2,065,300 constituting secondary speakers. Bilingualism with French has been declining in English Canada in recent years.
TFO
TFO (short for Télévision française de l'Ontario) is a Canadian publicly funded French language educational television channel and media organization serving the province of Ontario. It is owned by the Ontario French-language Educational Communications Authority (OTÉLFO), a Crown corporation owned by the Government of Ontario and operating as GroupeMédia TFO. It is the only French-language broadcasters in Canada that operates entirely outside Quebec. The network airs cultural programming, including blocks of French-language children's programs, along with original series, documentaries, and films.
History of Ontario
Ontario has no official language, but English is considered the "de facto" language. Numerous French language services are available under the French Language Services Act of 1990 in designated areas where sizable francophone populations exist.
Franco-Ontarian
Some smaller communities in Ontario have a francophone majority. These include Hearst, Kapuskasing, Smooth Rock Falls, Embrun, St. Charles, Sturgeon Falls, Rockland, Casselman, Dubreuilville, Vankleek Hill and Hawkesbury.
French Canadians
Six million of Canada's native French speakers, of all origins, are found in the province of Quebec, where they constitute the majority language group, and another one million are distributed throughout the rest of Canada. Roughly 31% of Canadian citizens are French-speaking and 25% are of French-Canadian descent. Not all French speakers are of French descent, and not all people of French-Canadian heritage are exclusively or primarily French-speaking.
Charter of the French Language
According to Statistics Canada, up to 244,000 English-speaking people have emigrated from Quebec to other provinces since the 1970s; those in Quebec whose sole native language was English dropped from 789,000 in 1971 to 575,555 in 2006, when they accounted for 7.6% of the population. Altogether, in 2006, 744,430 (10%) used mostly English as their home language, and 918,955 (12.2%) comprised the Official Language Minority, having English as their First Official language spoken. When many anglophones relocated outside of Quebec after the introduction of the Charter in the 1970s, several English-language schools in Montreal closed their doors. These school closures may also have been brought about by restrictions on who can attend English schools, which has been another ongoing drain on the English school system. Of the Anglophones between 25 and 44 years old who left the province between 1981 and 1986, 15000 individuals, which was half of this group, had university degrees. The province's unemployment rate rose from 8.7 percent in 1976 to 10.4 percent in 1977, remaining above 10 percent for 19 of the last 23 years of the 20th century. The language barrier has also been regarded as a "soft cap" for population growth; for instance from 2013 to 2014 while Montreal gained around 43,000 immigrants from other parts of the world it lost 10,000 residents to other provinces.
Official bilingualism in Canada
At least 35% of Canadians speak more than one language. Moreover, fewer than 2% of Canadians cannot speak at least one of the two official languages. However, of these multilingual Canadians, somewhat less than one fifth of the population (5,448,850 persons, or 17.4% of the Canadian population) are able to maintain a conversation in both of the official languages according to a self-assessment. However, in Canada the terms "bilingual" and "unilingual" are normally used to refer to bilingualism in English and French. In this sense, nearly 83% of Canadians are "unilingual".
Occitan language
According to the 1999 census, there were 610,000 native speakers (almost all of whom are also native French speakers) and perhaps another million persons with some exposure to the language. Following the pattern of language shift, most of this remainder is to be found among the eldest populations. Occitan activists (called "Occitanists") have attempted, in particular with the advent of Occitan-language preschools (the "Calandretas"), to reintroduce the language to the young.
Southern Ontario
For thousands of years, Ontario has been home to indigenous aboriginal communities, with numerous nations with differing languages at the time of European contact. Over 200,000 aboriginal Canadians live in Southern Ontario today.
Welland
In 1914, a local business called Empire Cotton Mills was bought by a Quebec-based company. They brought in twenty francophone families to work in the mill, giving a start to a French-speaking community . Welland is one of only three communities in southern Ontario (excluding eastern Ontario) where Franco-Ontarians, as a percentage of the community's population, exceed the provincial average of 4.8%. (The other two are Penetanguishene and Lakeshore.)
Ontario
The majority of Ontarians are of English or other European descent including large Scottish, Irish and Italian communities. Slightly less than 5 per cent of the population of Ontario is Franco-Ontarian, that is those whose native tongue is French, although those with French ancestry account for 11 per cent of the population. In relation to natural increase or inter-provincial migration, immigration is a huge population growth force in Ontario, as it has been over the last two centuries. More recent sources of immigrants with large or growing communities in Ontario include South Asians, Caribbeans, Latin Americans, Europeans, Asians, and Africans. Most populations have settled in the larger urban centres.
English Canadians
The population of the provinces other than Quebec in the 2001 Census is some 22,514,455. It is impossible to know with certainty how many of that number would self-identify as 'English Canadians' under the broadest interpretation of the term. Persons self-identifying with 'English' as their primary ethnic origin as part of the 2001 census - Quebec included - totaled slightly less than 6,000,000 persons. However, many Canadians who identify other ethnic origins for the purpose of the census might identify as 'English Canadian' in the broader sense of 'English-speaking Canadians' and possibly share some cultural affinities with the group identifying itself as 'English Canadian' in the more limited sense.
Demographics of New Brunswick
New Brunswick is one of Canada's three Maritime provinces, and the only officially bilingual province (French and English) in the country. The provincial Department of Finance estimates that the province's population in 2006 was 729,997 of which the majority is English-speaking but with a substantial (32%) French-speaking minority of mostly Acadian origin.
Alberta
Alberta has considerable ethnic diversity. In line with the rest of Canada, many immigrants originated from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and France, but large numbers also came from other parts of Europe, notably Germany, Ukraine and Scandinavia. According to Statistics Canada, Alberta is home to the second-highest proportion (two percent) of Francophones in western Canada (after Manitoba). Despite this, relatively few Albertans claim French as their mother tongue. Many of Alberta's French-speaking residents live in the central and northwestern regions of the province.
Official bilingualism in the public service of Canada
For the greater part of Canada’s history, French-speakers were underrepresented, and English-speakers were overrepresented in the ranks of the public service. This disproportion became more pronounced in the more senior ranks of the Public Service. However, this trend has reversed itself in recent decades. Today, French is the first official language of 23% of Canada's population, with 29.2% of Public Service of Canada employees identifying French as their first official language, including 32% of management-level jobs.
French language in Canada
The province has no official language defined in law, although it is a largely English-speaking province. Ontario law requires that the provincial Legislative Assembly operate in both English and French (individuals can speak in the Assembly in the official language of their choice), and requires that all provincial statutes and bills be made available in both English and French. Furthermore, under the French Language Services Act, individuals are entitled to communicate with the head or central office of any provincial government department or agency in French, as well as to receive all government services in French in 25 designated areas in the province, selected according to minority population criteria. The provincial government of Ontario's website is bilingual. Residents of Ottawa, Toronto, Windsor, Sudbury and Timmins can receive services from their municipal government in the official language of their choice.
French Language Services Act
In order for an area to obtain designation, Francophones must make up at least 10% of its population, and urban centres must have at least 5,000 francophones. Previous to 2009, the definition of a francophone in Ontario included only native French speakers. This definition was broadened by the Government of Ontario in June 2009 "to better reflect the changing face and diversity of Ontario's Francophone communities." The new Inclusive Definition of Francophones (IDF) now includes allophones, "those whose mother tongue is neither French nor English but have particular knowledge of French as an official language and use French at home, including many recent immigrants to Ontario for whom French is the language of integration."
Brampton was designated as the province's 24th bilingual service centre in 2004, and the designation officially came into effect in March 2007. Kingston was designated as the 25th bilingual service centre in May 2006, and French services officially came into effect in 2009.
Leamington, Ontario
The majority of people from Leamington speak English. According to the 2006 census, 16,915 speak English only, 8460 male and 8460 female. Around 600 people speak French due to the French school; 10,840 speak other languages, such as German, Spanish and Arabic; and 45 speak English and French.
Canadian French
"Acadian French" is spoken by over 350,000 Acadians in parts of the Maritime Provinces, Newfoundland, the Magdalen Islands, the Lower North Shore and the Gaspé peninsula. St. Mary's Bay French is a variety of Acadian French spoken in Nova Scotia.
Chinese Canadians in the Greater Toronto Area
In 2006, according to Statistics Canada, there were 166,650 in the Greater Toronto Area who had Cantonese as their native language, while there were 62,850 persons who had Mandarin as their native language. By 2009 Mandarin was becoming the dominant variety of Toronto's Chinese community.
Franco-Ontarian
Further, those who do have higher levels of education often pursue job opportunities in larger cities, particularly Ottawa or even Montreal, which can create a barrier to economic development in their home communities. As well, even today many students of Franco-Ontarian background are still educated in anglophone schools. This has the effect of reducing the use of French as a first language in the province, and thereby limiting the growth of the Franco-Ontarian community; in the Canada 2006 Census, for example, 40 per cent of residents of Sudbury reported themselves as able to speak or understand French, but only 16 per cent of the city's population reported actually using the French language in their daily lives and barely one per cent of the city's population reported themselves as being exclusively francophone.
English-speaking Quebecers
English-speaking Quebecers (also known as Anglo-Quebecers, English Quebecers, or Anglophone Quebecers, all with the optional spelling Quebeckers; in French "Anglo-Québécois", "Québécois Anglophone", or simply "Anglo") are terms used to refer to English speaking members of Quebec. Anglo-Quebecers (anglophone) are a minority due to the official language of the French-speaking (francophone) province of Quebec, Canada. The English-speaking community in Quebec constitutes an official linguistic minority population under Canadian law.
Francophone Assembly of Ontario
The organization was created in 1910 as the "Association canadienne-française d'Éducation de l'Ontario" ("ACFÉO") to lobby for French language education rights in the province. The organization and the Franco-Ontarian community at large faced a serious early crisis when the provincial government adopted Regulation 17 in 1912, effectively banning the teaching of French in schools. The regulation was never fully implemented because of ACFÉO's litigation, and it was eventually repealed in 1927.
French language in Canada
French is one of the official languages, with English, of the province of New Brunswick. Apart from Quebec, this is the only other Canadian province that recognizes French as an official language. Approximately one-third of New Brunswickers are francophone, by far the largest Acadian population in Canada.
English Canadians
The data in the following tables pertain to the population of Canada reporting English as its sole mother tongue, a total of 17,352,315 inhabitants out of 29,639,035. A figure for single ethnic origin responses is provide, as well as a total figure for ethnic origins appearing in single or multiple responses (for groups exceeding 2% of the total English-speaking population). The sum of the percentages for single responses is less than 100%, while the corresponding total for single or multiple responses is greater than 100%. The data are taken from the 2001 Census of Canada.
French Canadians
Since 1968, French has been one of Canada's two official languages. It is the sole official language of Quebec and one of the official languages of New Brunswick, Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. The province of Ontario has no official languages defined in law, although the provincial government provides French language services in many parts of the province under the French Language Services Act.
Occitan language
Occitan's decline is somewhat less pronounced in Béarn because of the province's history (a late addition to the Kingdom of France), though even there the language is little spoken outside the homes of the rural elderly. The village of Artix is notable for having elected to post street signs in the local language.
The area where Occitan was historically dominant has approximately 16 million inhabitants. Recent research has shown it may be spoken as a first language by approximately 789,000 people in France, Italy, Spain and Monaco. In Monaco, Occitan coexists with Monégasque Ligurian, which is the other native language. Some researchers state that up to seven million people in France understand the language, whereas twelve to fourteen million fully spoke it in 1921. In 1860, Occitan speakers represented more than 39% of the whole French population (52% for francophones proper); they were still 26% to 36% in the 1920s and fewer than 7% in 1993.
Winnipeg
More than a hundred languages are spoken in Winnipeg, of which the most common is English: 99 percent of Winnipeggers are fluent English speakers, 88 percent speak only English, and 0.1 percent speak only French (Canada's other official language). 10 percent speak both English and French, while 1.3 percent speak neither. Other languages spoken as a mother tongue in Winnipeg include Tagalog (5.0%), German (2.5%), and Punjabi and Ukrainian (both 1.4%). Several Aboriginal languages are also spoken, such as Ojibwe (0.3%) and Cree (0.2%).
French diaspora
The United States is home to the largest community of people outside of France who have identified as being of French descent. According to the last census of 2010, more than 11.5 million Americans claim French ancestry (French and French Canadian combined), i.e. 4% of the total population. French Americans make up more than 10% of the population in New England, through the emigration from Quebec between 1840 and 1930, and in Louisiana, through the French colonization of the region, the relocalization of deported Acadians and later immigration from Saint-Domingue and from continental France. French is the fourth most spoken language in the United States, after English, Spanish and Chinese with over 2 million speakers.
French Language Services Act
Historically, the Franco-Ontarian community had been ignored or treated with contempt by the government of Ontario, most notably with the adoption in 1912 of Regulation 17, which forbade the use of French as a language of school instruction in Ontario. Regulation 17 was challenged in court by the activist organization ACFÉO, and was never fully implemented before its repeal in 1927. However, it was not until 1968 that the provincial government amended the "Education Act" to officially recognize the existence of French language schools in the province.
Allophone (Canada)
In 2001, 24.2% of the population of Ontario were allophones.
Allophone (Canada)
Increasing numbers of allophones speak French at home: about 20.4% of allophones in the province reported that they spoke French most often at home in 2001, compared with 16.6% in 1996 and 15.4% in 1991. Most allophones live in Montreal, Quebec's largest metropolitan area. They tend to migrate out of the province: between 1996 and 2001, over 19,170 migrated to other provinces; 18,810 who migrated to Ontario.
History of Ontario
Regulation 17 was a regulation of the Conservative government designed to shut down French-language schools at a time that Francophones from Quebec were moving into eastern Ontario. In July 1912, the Conservative government of Sir James P. Whitney issued Regulation 17, which severely limited the provision of French-language schooling to the province's French-speaking minority. French could only be used in the first two years of schooling, and after that students and teachers were required to use English in classrooms. Few of the teachers at the French-language schools were fluent in English, so the schools had to close. The French-Canadian population, which was growing rapidly in eastern Ontario from migration, reacted with outrage; journalist Henri Bourassa denounced the "Prussians of Ontario". With the Great War raging, Anglophones were insulted by the comparison. The restriction on French- language schools contributed to the Francophones turning away from the war effort in 1915 and refusing to enlist. But, most of Ontario's Catholics were Irish, led by Irish Bishop Fallon, who united with the Protestants in opposing French schools. The government repealed Regulation 17 in 1927.
Varieties of French
Dialects of the French language are spoken in France and around the world. The francophones of France generally use Metropolitan French (spoken in Paris and considered standard) although some also use regional dialects or varieties such as Meridional French. In Europe outside France there are Belgian French, Swiss French, and in Italy Aostan French. In Canada, French is an official language along with English; the two main dialects of French in Canada are Quebec French and Acadian French, but also another dialect commonly grouped as Canadian French, used by Anglophones speaking French as a second language or by Francophones in Canada using a different dialect. In Lebanon, French was an official language until 1941 and the main dialect spoken there is Lebanese French or Levantine French. Note that the discussion here refers to varieties of the French language, not to the Romance sister languages (sometimes considered dialects) of French spoken in France (e.g. Picard, Limousin, Gascon, etc.; for these languages see: Langues d'oïl, Francoprovençal, Occitan and languages of France). See also French-based creole languages, which are also considered separate languages.
List of francophone communities in Ontario
The provincial average of Ontarians whose mother tongue is French is 4.1%, with a total of 549,000 people in Ontario who identify French as their mother tongue in 2016. The majority of francophones in Ontario live in eastern and northeastern Ontario. While most communities in these areas have sizeable French minorities, several municipalities have francophone majorities.
Languages of the United States
French, the fourth-most-common language (when all varieties of Chinese are combined and separate yet related languages such as Haitian Creole are counted as French), is spoken mainly by the Louisiana Creole, native French, Cajun, Haitian, and French-Canadian populations. It is widely spoken in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and in Louisiana, with notable Francophone enclaves in St. Clair County, Michigan, many rural areas of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the northern San Francisco Bay area. 
Three varieties of French developed within what is now the United States in colonial times: Louisiana French, Missouri French, and New England French (essentially a variant of Canadian French). French is the second language in the states of Louisiana (where the French dialect of Cajun predominates) and Maine. The largest French-speaking communities in the United States reside in Northeast Maine; Hollywood and Miami, Florida; New York City; certain areas of rural Louisiana; and small minorities in Vermont and New Hampshire. Many of the New England communities are connected to the dialect found across the border in Quebec or New Brunswick. More than 13 million Americans possess primary French heritage, but only 2 million speak French or a French Creole language at home.
List of endangered languages in Canada
The number of people who speak the Ottawa dialect is unknown, though it is predicted to be around 13,000. Native communities received $5 million a year for 7 years (2007-2014) to help them in their efforts to preserve their languages and teach it to their children. The language is written with Latin letters and is a dialect of the Ojibwe language. Many descendants of migrants now live in Kansas and Oklahoma.
Quebec
A considerable number of Quebec residents consider themselves to be bilingual in French and English. In Quebec, about 42.6 percent of the population (3,328,725 people) report knowing both languages; this is the highest proportion of bilinguals of any Canadian province. One specific area in the Bilingual Belt called the West Island of Montreal, represented by the federal electoral district of Lac-Saint-Louis, is the most bilingual area in the province: 72.8% of its residents claim to know English and French according to the most recent census. In contrast, in the rest of Canada, in 2006 only about 10.2 percent (2,430,990) of the population had a knowledge of both of the country's official languages. Altogether, 17.5% of Canadians are bilingual in French and English.
French Americans
Country-wide, there are about 10.4 million U.S. residents that declare French ancestry or French Canadian descent, and about 1.32 million speak French at home as of 2010 census. An additional 750,000 U.S. residents speak a French-based creole language, according to the 2011 American Community Survey.
Language demographics of Quebec
In 2001, 29% of Quebec workers declared using English, either solely (193,320), mostly (293,320), equally with French (212,545) or regularly (857,420). The proportion rose to 37% in the Montreal metropolitan area, where bilingualism is common. Outside Montreal, on the other hand, the proportion of anglophones has shrunk to 3% of the population and, except on the Ontario and U.S. borders, struggles to maintain a critical mass to support educational and health institutions – a reality that only immigrants and francophones usually experience in the other provinces. Unilingual anglophones are however still on the decline because of the higher English-French bilingualism of the community's younger generations.
Demolinguistic descriptors used in Canada
This index has been used by the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages to determine the health of French-language minority populations outside Quebec. The index "represents the relation between the number of persons speaking French most often at home and the number of persons for whom French is the mother tongue. A continuity index of less than 1 means that French registers more losses than gains in its exchanges with other languages." The exact number reveals the percentage of the French-language population (as measured by mother tongue) that continues to use French as its home language. The remainder of this population now uses English as its preferred language in the home, which is a strong indicator of assimilation.
Quebec diaspora
The development of mining and forestry resources in the northeastern and eastern regions of Ontario at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century attracted a large workforce from Quebec. A great part of today's half a million Franco-Ontarians are the descendants of these Quebec emigrants. The Francophone population of Ontario is today still concentrated mainly in the northeastern and eastern parts of Ontario, close to the border with Quebec, although smaller pockets of Francophone settlement exist throughout the province in areas like Windsor, Welland and St. Catherines.
Pennsylvania German language
In Ontario, Canada, the Old Order Amish, the members of the Ontario Old Order Mennonite Conference, the David Martin Old Order Mennonites, the Orthodox Mennonites and smaller pockets of others (regardless of religious affiliation) speak Pennsylvania German. The members of the car driving Old Order Markham-Waterloo Mennonite Conference have mostly switched to English. In 2017, there were about 10.000 speakers of Pennsylvania German in Canada, far fewer than in the United States.
Demographics of Quebec
The demographics of Quebec constitutes a complex and sensitive issue, especially as it relates to the National question. Quebec is the only province in Canada to feature a francophone (French-speaking) majority, and where anglophones (English-speakers) constitute an officially recognized minority group. According to the 2011 census, French is spoken by more than 85.5% of the population while this number rises to 88% for children under 15 years old. According to the 2011 census, 95% of Quebec is francophone, with less than 5% of the population not able to speak French.
French Language Services Act
"Whereas the French language is a historic and honoured language in Ontario and recognized by the Constitution as an official language in Canada; and whereas in Ontario the French language is recognized as an official language in the courts and in education; and whereas the Legislative Assembly recognizes the contribution of the cultural heritage of the French speaking population and wishes to preserve it for future generations; and whereas it is desirable to guarantee the use of the French language in institutions of the Legislature and the Government of Ontario, as provided in this Act."
French language in Canada
Although French is the native language of just over half a million Canadians in Ontario, francophone Ontarians represent only 4.4 percent of the province's population. They are concentrated primarily in the Eastern Ontario and Northeastern Ontario regions, near the border with Quebec, although they are also present in smaller numbers throughout the province. Forty percent of Franco-Ontarians no longer speak the language at home. However, Ottawa is the city which counts the biggest number of Franco-Ontarians.
The Franco-Ontarians are originally from a first wave of immigration from France, from a second wave from Quebec. The third wave comes from Quebec, but also from Haiti, Europe, Africa, Vietnam, etc.
Francophone Assembly of Ontario
The organization continued to lobby for the improvement of French language services in the province. It was instrumental in the adoption of the French Language Services Act in 1986, and in the creation of Ontario's three francophone colleges: Collège La Cité in Ottawa, Collège Boréal in Sudbury and the defunct Collège des Grands-Lacs in Toronto. As well, ACFO lobbied against the provincial government's planned closure of Ottawa's Montfort Hospital.
French Canadians
There are various urban and small centres in Canada outside Quebec that have long-standing populations of French Canadians, going back to the late 19th century, due to interprovincial migration. Eastern and Northern Ontario have large populations of francophones in communities such as Ottawa, Cornwall, Hawkesbury, Sudbury, Welland, Timmins and Windsor. Many also pioneered the Canadian Prairies in the late 18th century, founding the towns of Saint Boniface, Manitoba and in Alberta's Peace Country, including the region of Grande Prairie.
New Brunswick
According to the Canadian Constitution, both English and French are the official languages of New Brunswick, making it the only officially bilingual province. Anglophone New Brunswickers make up roughly two-thirds of the population, with about one-third being Francophone. Recently there has been growth in the numbers of people reporting themselves as bilingual, with 34% reporting that they speak both English and French. This reflects a trend across Canada.
Languages of Canada
Alongside ASL, Quebec Sign Language or LSQ ("Langue des signes québécoise") is the second most spoken sign language in the country. Centred mainly around and within Quebec, LSQ can also be found in Ontario, New Brunswick and various other parts of the country, generally around francophone communities due to historical ties to the French language. Although approximately 10% of the population of Quebec is deaf or hard-of-hearing, it is estimated that only 50,000 to 60,000 children use LSQ as their native language. LSQ is part of the Francosign family with ASL. As such, both languages are mutually intelligible.
Francophone Assembly of Ontario
In 2004, the organization changed its name to "L'Assemblée de la francophonie de l'Ontario", partly to reflect Canadian francophones' modern shift away from identifying as French Canadian. In 2010 / 2011, their revenue was 1.4 million dollars. 1.2 million of that came from various government entities.The organization's current president is Carol Jolin.
Acadian French
Acadian French () is a dialect of Canadian French originally associated with the Acadians of what is now the Maritimes in Canada. The dialect is still spoken by the Francophone population of the Canadian province of New Brunswick, by small minorities on the Gaspé Peninsula and the Magdalen Islands of Quebec as well as in pockets of Francophones in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. In the United States, the dialect is spoken in the Saint John Valley of northern Aroostook County, Maine. Besides standard French, New England French is the predominant form of French spoken elsewhere in Maine.
Francization
The success of francization of Quebec can also be seen over the borders of its territory: in Ontario, the proportion of English speakers dropped from 70.5% in 2001 to 68% in 2006, while the proportion of French speakers went up from 4.06% (488 815) in 2006 to 4.80% (580 000) in 2009. However, this statistic must be examined in conjunction with the effects of Quebec francophone out-migration. Interprovincial migration, especially to Ontario, results in a net loss of population in Quebec. The number of French-speaking Quebecers leaving the province tends to be similar to the number entering, while immigrants to Quebec tend to leave.
Languages of Canada
According to the 2011 census, 94.3% of Quebecers have knowledge of French, and 47.2% have knowledge of English. Bilingualism (of the two official languages) is largely limited to Quebec itself, and to a strip of territory sometimes referred to as the "bilingual belt", that stretches east from Quebec into northern New Brunswick and west into parts of Ottawa and northeastern Ontario. 85% of bilingual Canadians live within Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick. A majority of all bilingual Canadians, (57.4%) are themselves Quebecers, and a high percentage of the bilingual population in the rest of Canada resides in close proximity to the Quebec border.
Canadian English
English is a minority language in Quebec (with French in the majority), but has many speakers in Montreal, the Eastern Townships and in the Gatineau-Ottawa region. Uniquely, many people in Montreal distinguish between words like "marry" versus "merry" and "parish" versus "perish", which are homophones to most other speakers of Canadian English. Quebec also has French influence. A person with English mother tongue and still speaking English as the first language is called an "Anglophone" versus a French speaker, or "Francophone". Quebec Anglophones generally pronounce French street names in Montreal as French words. "Pie IX" Boulevard is pronounced as in French, not as "pie nine", but as "pee-neuff". On the other hand, Anglophones do pronounce final d's as in "Bernard" and "Bouchard"; the word "Montreal" is pronounced as an English word and "Rue Lambert-Closse" is known as "Clossy Street".
Embrun, Ontario
Language: 57% of Embrun's population speaks French at home, while 41% speak English at home. The remaining 2% speak either both languages equally, or speak a non-official language. However, because there a significant number of French-Canadians who change their primary language to English later in life, the number of people whose mother tongue is French is higher than those who speak French as their main home language. 63% of Embrun residents list French as their mother tongue, while 33% list English as their mother tongue. 66% of Embrun residents are bilingual in both English and French, 24% speak only English, and 9% speak only French. For language of work, the English language is disproportionately common; while only 41% of Embrun residents speak English at home, 57% of Embrun residents speak primarily or exclusively English at work.
Canadian English
The Greater Toronto Area is diverse linguistically, with 44 percent of its people holding a mother tongue other than English. As a result Toronto has a distinct variation from other regions. In Toronto's ethnic communities there are many words that are distinct, many of which come from the city's large Caribbean community. Although only 1.5% of Torontonians speak French, a relatively low proportion of them (56.2%) are native speakers of English, according to the 2006 Census. As a result Toronto shows a more variable speech pattern.
Algonquin language
Algonquin (also spelled Algonkin; in Algonquin: Anicinàbemowin or Anishinàbemiwin) is either a distinct Algonquian language closely related to the Ojibwe language or a particularly divergent Ojibwe dialect. It is spoken, alongside French and to some extent English, by the Algonquin First Nations of Quebec and Ontario. As of 2006, there were 2,680 Algonquin speakers, less than 10% of whom were monolingual. Algonquin is the language for which the entire Algonquian language subgroup is named. The similarity among the names often causes considerable confusion. Like many Native American languages, it is strongly verb-based, with most meaning being incorporated into verbs instead of using separate words for prepositions, tense, etc.
French language in Canada
Quebec is the only province whose sole official language is French. Today, 81.4 percent of Quebecers are first language francophones. About 95 percent of Quebecers speak French. However, many of the services the provincial government provides are available in English for the sizeable anglophone population of the province (notably in Montreal). For native French speakers, Quebec French is noticeably different in pronunciation and vocabulary from the French of France, sometimes called "Metropolitan French", but they are easily mutually intelligible in their formal varieties, and after moderate exposure, in most of their informal ones as well. The differences are primarily due to changes that have occurred in Quebec French and Parisian French since the 18th century, when Britain gained possession of Canada.
Different regions of Quebec have their own varieties: Gaspé Peninsula, Côte-Nord, Quebec City, Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, Outaouais, and Abitibi-Témiscamingue have differences in pronunciation as well as in vocabulary. For example, depending on one's region, the ordinary word for "kettle" can be or .
Demographics of Ontario
As of 2016 census.
Note: The table takes "dual responses" (for example if someone is French-Canadian he/she would be added to both French and Canadian). Some places of one's ethnic origin do not refer to a single specified country of origin, i.e. "Spanish" refers to people from Spanish speaking countries such as Colombia, Spain, Cuba and others; or "East Indian" where the respondents origin could be from Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, etc.; and the list contains about 200 nationalities known to reside in the province. However, there are options for the respondent to identify the country alone.
French language in Canada
"Acadian French" is spoken by over 350,000 Acadians in parts of the Maritime Provinces, Newfoundland, the Magdalen Islands, and the Gaspé peninsula.
French River, Ontario
French River, also known as Rivière-des-Français, is a municipality in the Canadian province of Ontario, in the Sudbury District. The municipality had a population of 2,662 in the Canada 2016 Census. It was formed in 1999 through the merger of the Township of Cosby, Mason and Martland and surrounding unincorporated portions of the Unorganized North Sudbury District. It was named after the French River that flows through the municipality.
Chronic disease in Northern Ontario
The estimated area of Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) 13 is 400,000 square kilometres or approximately 40% of Ontario, with a population of 551,691. In LHIN 13, 17% of the population is 65 years of age or older, which is significantly higher than the provincial average of 14%. LHIN 13 is diverse with 24% of the population Francophone and 10% of the population First Nations (North East LHIN, 2009). The estimated area of LHIN 14 is 470,000 square kilometers or approximately 47% of Ontario, with a population of 234,599. In LHIN 14, 14.3% of the population is 65 years of age or older. LHIN 14 is diverse with 3.5% of the population Francophone and 19.8% First Nations (North West LHIN, 2009).
Languages of Canada
According to the 2011 census, 98.2% of Canadian residents have knowledge of one or both of the country's two official languages, Between 2006 and 2011, the number of persons who reported being able to conduct a conversation in both of Canada's official languages increased by nearly 350,000 to 5.8 million. The bilingualism rate of the Canadian population edged up from 17.4% in 2006 to 17.5% in 2011. This growth of English-French bilingualism in Canada was mainly due to the increased number of Quebecers who reported being able to conduct a conversation in English and French.
Northern Ontario
The government of Canada provides French and English equally in all matters. In 2011, 10.2% of people in Northern Ontario spoke French most often at home, mostly in Northeastern Ontario.
List of endangered languages in Canada
There are about 8,000 speakers in the central Ojibwe language, and it has been spread over 16 communities in Canada. The language is spoken from Ontario Canada to Manitoba. It is also spoken in places from Michigan to Montana next to the Great Lakes which is the home of the Ojibwe people. The language today is spoken by people over the age of 70. The people of the Ojibwe language note that double vowels in their language are treated as standing for unit sounds, therefore they are alphabetized after corresponding single values.
Lorraine Franconian
In part from the ambiguity of the term, estimates of the number of speakers of Lorraine Franconian in France vary widely, ranging from 30,000 to 400,000 (which would make it the third most-spoken regional language in France, after Occitan and Alsatian).
Varieties of French
Ontario French is often divided into two categories: North and South. The further north the more French is spoken and the closer the dialect and culture is to Quebec French. The further south, the French becomes a more pronounced French with a more English cultural influence as well as a Parisian grammar and dialect structure, as both Parisian and Canadian French are taught in the French immersion schools.
Franco-Ontarian
Although Ontario as a whole is not officially bilingual, the Ontario government's French Language Services Act designates 25 areas of the province where provincial ministries and agencies are required to provide local French-language services to the public. An area is designated as a French service area if the francophone population is greater than 5,000 people "or" 10% of the community's total population. Due to the 5,000 population threshold, large cities that are actually overwhelmingly anglophone (and may also have several widely-spoken immigrant languages) with virtually no obvious francophone element due to very low percentages, such as Toronto (population 2,731,571) or Brampton (population 593,638) are nevertheless still subject to the Act.
Shahrvand
There are over 450,000 Persian speakers populating Canada; roughly 150,000 live in Southern Ontario, particularly in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area).
French language in Canada
French is the mother tongue of about 7.2 million Canadians (20.6% of the Canadian population, second to English at 56%) according to Census Canada 2016. Most native speakers of the French language in Canada live in Quebec, where French is the majority official language. 77% of Quebec's population are native francophones, and 95% of the population speak French as their first or second language. Additionally, about one million native francophones live in other provinces, forming a sizable minority in New Brunswick, which is officially a bilingual province, where about one-third of the population are francophone. There are also French-speaking communities in Manitoba and Ontario, where francophones make up about 4 percent of the population, as well as significantly smaller communities in Alberta, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Saskatchewan – around 1–2%. Many, but not all of these communities are supported by French-language institutions.
Official bilingualism in Canada
Manitoba is the only province that was officially bilingual at the time of its establishment.
Following the Red River Rebellion led by the Francophone Métis Louis Riel, the Manitoba Act was passed, creating the province and mandating the equal status of English and French in all legislative bodies, legislative records, laws and court proceedings. At this time, Manitoba had a majority Francophone population, but within 20 years mass immigration from Ontario and non-Francophone countries had reduced the Francophone proportion of the population to less than 10%. In 1890, the provincial government of Thomas Greenway stripped funding from the French school system and revoked the equal status of French, a controversial move that caused tension between French and English speakers throughout Canada.
Louisiana French
In Texas, , the French-speaking population was 55,773, though many of these were likely immigrants from France and other locations, living in the urban areas. Nevertheless, in the rural eastern/southeastern Texas counties of Orange, Jefferson, Chambers, Newton, Jasper, Tyler, Liberty, and Hardin alone—areas where it can be reasonably presumed that almost all French speakers are Louisiana French speakers—the total French-speaking population was composed of 3,400 individuals. It is likely a substantial portion of the 14,493 speakers in Houston's Harris county are also Louisiana French speakers. With this is mind, a marked decline in the number of French speakers in Texas has been noticed in the last half of the twentieth century. For example, at one point the French-speaking population of Jefferson County was 24,049 as compared to the mere 1,922 today. Likewise, in Harris County the French-speaking population has shifted from 26,796 to 14,493 individuals.
French people
There are nearly seven million French speakers out of nine to ten million people of French and partial French ancestry in Canada. The Canadian province of Quebec (2006 census population of 7,546,131), where more than 95 percent of the people speak French as either their first, second or even third language, is the center of French life on the Western side of the Atlantic; however, French settlement began further east, in Acadia. Quebec is home to vibrant French-language arts, media, and learning. There are sizable French-Canadian communities scattered throughout the other provinces of Canada, particularly in Ontario, which has about 1 million people with French ancestry (400 000 who have French as their mother tongue), Manitoba, and New Brunswick, which is the only fully bilingual province and is 33 percent Acadian.
Official bilingualism in Canada
Knowledge of the two official languages is largely determined by geography. Nearly 95% of Quebecers can speak French, but only 40.6% speak English. In the rest of the country, 97.6% of the population is capable of speaking English, but only 7.5% can speak French. Personal bilingualism is most concentrated in southern Quebec and a swath of territory sometimes referred to as the "bilingual belt", which stretches east from Quebec through northern and eastern New Brunswick and west through Ottawa and that part of Ontario lying to the east of Ottawa, as well as north-eastern Ontario. There is also a large French-speaking population in Manitoba. In all, 55% of bilingual Canadians are Quebecers, and a high percentage of the bilingual population in the rest of Canada resides in Ontario and New Brunswick. Statistics Canada collects much of its language data from self-assessments.
Franco-Ontarian
Ottawa, with 128,620 francophones, has the province's largest Franco-Ontarian community by size. Among the province's major cities, Greater Sudbury has the largest proportion of Franco-Ontarians to the general population at 29 per cent, and Timmins has the largest proportion among the smaller sized cities at 41 per cent. Prescott and Russell United Counties has the highest proportion of Franco-Ontarians to the general population among the province's census divisions, with about two-thirds of the population being francophone.
Languages of Canada
In 1991, due to linguistic assimilation of Francophones outside Quebec, over one million Canadians who claimed English as their mother tongue were of French ethnic origin (1991 Census).
Languages of Canada
The percentage of the population who speak French both by mother tongue and home language has decreased over the past three decades. Whereas the number of those who speak English at home is higher than the number of people whose mother tongue is English, the opposite is true for Francophones. There are fewer people who speak French at home, than learned French after birth.
Ojibwe
The Ojibwe people traditionally speak the Ojibwe language, a branch of the Algonquian language family. They are part of the Council of Three Fires and the Anishinaabeg, which include the Algonquin, Nipissing, Oji-Cree, Odawa and the Potawatomi. Historically, through the Saulteaux branch, they were a part of the Iron Confederacy, joining the Cree, Assiniboine and, Metis.
The majority of the Ojibwe people live in Canada. There are 77,940 mainline Ojibwe; 76,760 Saulteaux; and 8,770 Mississauga, organized in 125 bands. They live from western Quebec to eastern British Columbia. , Ojibwe in the US census population is 170,742.
French language
French is estimated to have about 76 million native speakers and about 235 million daily, fluent speakers, and another 77 to 110 million secondary speakers who speak it as a second language to varying degrees of proficiency, mainly in Africa. According to the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), approximately 300 million people worldwide are "able to speak the language", without specifying the criteria for this estimation or whom it encompasses. According to a demographic projection led by the Université Laval and the Réseau Démographie de l'Agence universitaire de la francophonie, the total number of French speakers will reach approximately 500 million in 2025 and 650 million by 2050. OIF estimates 700 million by 2050, 80% of whom will be in Africa.
English Canada
Estimates of Canadians with origins described as English is estimated to be about six million; a precise number is difficult to estimate for several reasons. Another 6.7 million people reported their ethnicity as simply "Canadian" without further specification, which would include those with an admixture of multiple ethnicities, particularly those long present in Canada (e.g. French, Irish, English, and Scottish), making it possible that the number is much higher than the nearly 6 million who reported as having English origins. On the other hand, historically, there have also been numerous Canadians who have hidden their true ancestry for different political reasons to join the dominant English group, such as to avoid discrimination, as seems to have been the case of the reported German-origin population, which dropped by nearly half after the First World War with a commensurate rise in reports of English origins.
Ministry of Francophone Affairs
Under the province's French Language Services Act, the provincial government provides French language services if a community or region's francophone population exceeds 5,000 or 10 percent of the community's total population. There are 25 areas of the province so designated. The office also has a role in the governance of Ontario's francophone public television network, TFO, as well as francophone school boards and other government offices, and acts as a liaison office between the government and other francophone cultural agencies and social services.
Quebec
The official language of Quebec is French. Quebec is the only Canadian province whose population is mainly Francophone; 6,102,210 people (78.1 percent of the population) recorded it as their sole native language in the 2011 Census, and 6,249,085 (80.0%) recorded that they spoke it most often at home. Knowledge of French is widespread even among those who do not speak it natively; in 2011, about 94.4 percent of the total population reported being able to speak French, alone or in combination with other languages, while 47.3% reported being able to speak English.
Milton, Ontario
In 2015, the population numbers on all signs entering Milton increased to 100,000 based on official estimates by Town planners. According to the Canada 2016 Census there were 101,715 people living in Milton, and its population in 2006 was 53,939, representing an increase of 56.5%. The 2016 Census counted 32,452 housing units and 31,325 being occupied.According to the 2016 Census, English is the mother tongue for 60.6% of the population, down from 77.6% in the 2006 Census. However, the absolute number of native English speakers actually "increased" (61,180 in 2011, from 41,430 in 2006), but the increase in the absolute number of non-English native speakers was even higher, thus explaining the decrease in its relative proportion of English as mother tongue in the population. French is the mother tongue for 1.4% of the population.
Chatham-Kent
Approximately 8,500 residents of Chatham-Kent have French as a mother tongue and 1,500 have French as their home language. Essex County also has a relatively large francophone population, especially in the municipality of Lakeshore. Together, Chatham–Kent and Essex Counties make up one of the concentrations of Franco-Ontarians in the province of Ontario.
Language policies of Canada's provinces and territories
Ontario has a regionalized language policy, where part of the province is English-only and other areas are bilingual. Province-wide services (such as websites and toll-free telephone numbers) are provided in both English and French. However individuals only have a "right" to French-language services in certain designated regions of the province under the "French Language Services Act" (1986). There are 25 regions so designated. These are: areas with 10% or more Francophones; urban centres with 5,000 or more Francophones; and areas previously designated by the Government of Ontario between 1978 and 1985. Notably this includes Toronto, the provincial capital and Canada's largest municipality (although not all of the regional municipalities of the GTA are included), and the National Capital Region including Ottawa, the national capital, as well as many other cities, counties, districts, townships, and towns. For the purposes of the policy, the definition of a "Francophone" was broadened in 2009. Previously it included only mother-tongue speakers, however it now includes allophones (people whose first language is neither French or English) who "have particular knowledge of French as an official language and use French at home, including many recent immigrants to Ontario for whom French is the language of integration".
Franco-Ontarian
In addition, the majority of Franco-Ontarians are, out of necessity, functionally or fluently bilingual in English, a fact that encourages borrowing, as does the fact that the English language has a greater prestige in the province from its being a majority language. Franco-Ontarian communities with a small francophone population tend to have more English-influenced French, and some younger speakers there may feel more comfortable using English than French. On the other hand, the French spoken in French-dominant Ontarian communities (such as Hearst and Hawkesbury), or in those communities near the Quebec border (such as Ottawa), is virtually indistinguishable from Quebec French.
Canada
The 1977 Charter of the French Language established French as the official language of Quebec. Although more than 85 percent of French-speaking Canadians live in Quebec, there are substantial Francophone populations in New Brunswick, Alberta, and Manitoba; Ontario has the largest French-speaking population outside Quebec. New Brunswick, the only officially bilingual province, has a French-speaking Acadian minority constituting 33 percent of the population. There are also clusters of Acadians in southwestern Nova Scotia, on Cape Breton Island, and through central and western Prince Edward Island.
Languages of Canada
In 2011, just over 7.1 million Canadians spoke French most often at home, this was a rise of 4.2%, although the proportion of people in Canada who spoke French "most often" at home fell slightly from 21.7% to 21.5% . Of these, about 6.1 million or 85% resided in Quebec. Outside Quebec, the largest French-speaking populations are found in New Brunswick (which is home to 3.1% of Canada's Francophones) and Ontario (4.2%, residing primarily in the eastern and northeastern parts of the province and in Toronto and Ottawa). Overall, 22% of people in Canada declare French to be their mother language, while one in three Canadians speak French and 70% are unilingual Anglophones. Smaller indigenous French-speaking communities exist in some other provinces. For example, a vestigial community exists on Newfoundland's Port au Port Peninsula; a remnant of the "French Shore" along the island's west coast.
Canadian French
"Quebec French" is spoken in Quebec. Closely related varieties are spoken by francophone communities in Ontario, Western Canada and the New England region of the United States, differing only from Quebec French primarily by their greater conservatism. The term "Laurentian French" has limited applications as a collective label for all these varieties, and "Quebec French" has also been used for the entire dialect group. The overwhelming majority of francophone Canadians speak this dialect.
Languages of Canada
Ethnic diversity is growing in French Canada but still lags behind the English-speaking parts of the country. In 2006, 91.5% of Quebecers considered themselves to be of either "French" or "Canadian" origin. As a result of the growth in immigration, since the 1970s, from countries in which French is a widely used language, 3.4% of Quebecers indicated that they were of Haitian, Belgian, Swiss, Lebanese or Moroccan origin. Other groups of non-francophone immigrants (Irish Catholics, Italian, Portuguese, etc.) have also assimilated into French over the generations. The Irish, who started arriving in large numbers in Quebec in the 1830s, were the first such group, which explains why it has been possible for Quebec to have had five premiers of Irish ethnic origin: John Jones Ross (1884–87), Edmund James Flynn (1896–97), Daniel Johnson Sr. (1966–68), Pierre-Marc Johnson (1985), and Daniel Johnson Jr. (1994).
Ottawa Valley
English and French are both commonly spoken throughout the Ottawa Valley on both sides of the river. The Counties of Prescott and Russell County, in the Ottawa Valley, has the highest concentration of francophones in Canada, living west of Quebec. The variant of French spoken in this area of the province is also based on Quebec French, but distinctly different from that of the Outaouais region.
Canada
A multitude of languages are used by Canadians, with English and French (the official languages) being the mother tongues of approximately 56% and 21% of Canadians, respectively. As of the 2016 Census, just over 7.3 million Canadians listed a non-official language as their mother tongue. Some of the most common non-official first languages include Chinese (1,227,680 first-language speakers), Punjabi (501,680), Spanish (458,850), Tagalog (431,385), Arabic (419,895), German (384,040), and Italian (375,645). Canada's federal government practices official bilingualism, which is applied by the Commissioner of Official Languages in consonance with Section 16 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Federal Official Languages Act English and French have equal status in federal courts, parliament, and in all federal institutions. Citizens have the right, where there is sufficient demand, to receive federal government services in either English or French and official-language minorities are guaranteed their own schools in all provinces and territories.
Orleans, Ontario
Largely a rural area for a great number of years, the first major suburban subdivision constructed in the community was the Queenswood Heights development starting in the late 1960s. Orléans has continued its steady growth as a suburban community since that time; its southern and easternmost boundaries continue to grow as more houses and businesses are built. Orléans has French-speaking population of over 30%. The community's name is spelled with an acute accent in French in the relevant regulation to the City of Ottawa Act, reflective of the area's francophone heritage.