Is French spoken in Ontario?
22218#43
The principal language of Ontario is English, the province's de facto official language, which is spoken natively by about 70% of the province's population, according to the 2011 census. There is also a French-speaking population concentrated in the northeastern, eastern, and extreme Southern parts of the province, where under the "French Language Services Act", provincial government services are required to be available in French if at least 10% of a designated area's population report French as their native language. Roughly 4% of Ontarians speak French as their mother tongue, and 11% are bilingual, speaking both English and French, according to the 2011 census. Other languages spoken by residents include Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, Dutch, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Malayalam, Mandarin, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Sinhalese, Somali, Spanish, Tagalog, Tamil, Tibetan, Urdu and Vietnamese.
Ontario
1385923#17
"Quebec French" is spoken in Quebec. Closely related varieties are spoken by francophone communities in Ontario, Western Canada, Labrador and in the New England region of the United States and differ from Quebec French primarily by their greater conservatism. The term "Laurentian French" has limited application 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.
French language in Canada
10904336#4
"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.
Canadian French
211003#55
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.
Northern Ontario
218667#1
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.
Franco-Ontarian
13022749#7
French is the dominant language in Quebec and Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and is spoken in Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Louisiana. It is spoken alongside French-based creole languages in Saint Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, Saint Barthélemy, and the French side of Saint Martin. French is one of the two official and national languages of Canada.
Languages of North America
1971129#7
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.
Varieties of French
218667#33
The dialects of French spoken in Ontario are similar to, but distinct from, Quebec French and constitute part of the greater Canadian French dialect. Due to the large English majority in the province, English loanwords are sometimes used in the informal or slang registers of Franco-Ontarian French. While English loanwords occur to a large extent in many varieties of French in Canada and Europe, there has been more of a conscious effort in Quebec to eliminate anglicisms.
Franco-Ontarian
218667#14
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.
Franco-Ontarian
6340#27
In Eastern Ontario, Canadian raising is not as strong as it is in the rest of the province. In Prescott and Russell, parts of Stormont-Dundas-Glengarry and Eastern Ottawa, French accents are often mixed with English ones due to the high Franco-Ontarian population there. In Lanark County, Western Ottawa and Leeds-Grenville and the rest of Stormont-Dundas-Glengarry, the accent spoken is nearly identical to that spoken in Central Ontario and the Quinte area. Phrases such as "got it" is often pronounced as . "Okay" is often pronounced as , while "hello" is often pronounced as .
Canadian English