What percentage of the Canadian population speaks French?
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.[1] 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.[2] 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,[3] as well as significantly smaller communities in Alberta, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Saskatchewan – around 1–2%.[3] Many, but not all of these communities are supported by French-language institutions.
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.