Franco-Ontarian
There are more than 600,000 francophones residing in Ontario. According to the 2016 Canadian census, there were 550,600 people living in Ontario who declared French their first official language spoken, 490,715 people who declared French their mother tongue, and 277,045 Ontarians who declared French as the language they speak most often at home. Over 1.4 million Ontarians reported themselves as bilingual, and 1.3 million Ontarians reported partial or full French ethnic origins. French-speaking Ontarians constitute the largest French-speaking community in Canada outside Quebec, as well as the largest minority language group within Ontario, and French is the fourth most common ethnic background in the province after English, Scottish and Irish.
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.