Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: What percentage of the Canadian population speaks French?
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.
The use of the French language in Canada is complex. In English-speaking regions of Canada, many former Canadian French language minorities have disappeared. Meanwhile, in Quebec, the decline of French has been reversed, and given high rates of emigration and substantial intermarriage with French Canadians, the English language has declined. Quebec's Eastern Townships, once a predominantly English-speaking region, is now overwhelmingly French-speaking. The French-speaking populations of neighboring Ontario and New Brunswick, once on the decline, have also rebounded.
In 1967, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in its report to Ottawa slammed the Canadian military for mostly operating in English and demanded that more be done to open career opportunities for French-Canadians. The Royal Commission criticized the Army for trapping French-Canadians within the Royal 22 Régiment and a few other units based in Quebec, stating that those French-Canadians who wanted to advance into high command had to serve in what Morton called "unfamiliar and sometimes inhospitable surroundings outside Quebec". Because the Army outside of the Royal 22 Régiment was not seen as friendly towards French-Canadians, very few French-Canadians enlisted and French-Canadian personnel in the Army did not reflect their percentage of the total population of Canada. Specifically, the royal commission demanded that more French-Canadian units be established outside of Quebec, that all officers holding high command be fluently bilingual and stated that 28% of recruits should be French-Canadian. All of the royal commission's recommendations were passed into law, and one consequence of the rule that those holding high command should be bilingual was to give French-Canadian officers something of a monopoly on high command for a generation as most French-Canadian officers were fluent in English while most English-Canadian officers were not fluent in French.
A majority of the population in Willow Bunch are married or living with a common law partner. This group makes up 57% of the population. Single residents account for 19% of the population and separated, divorced and widowed individuals make up 10% of the population.
There are 120 families in Willow Bunch, resulting in a total of 90 children from 0–25 years old. However the average number of children still at home according to the Canadian Census 2011 is 0.8. A majority of families are small families; two-person families represent the largest percentile (58%), while families of five or more make up the smallest section of the population (4%).
A majority of residents in Willow Bunch are of European or Métis Origins. The 2011 census reported 100% of Willow Bunch residents were not of a visible minority.
All residents in Willow Bunch are Canadian citizens. A very small portion of the community identify as immigrants (3%), while the remainder are not immigrants (97%).
The Canadian Household Survey 2011 reported Willow Bunch residents are primarily Christian.
Most Willow Bunch residents speak English as their mother tongue (84%), a smaller percentile identify French as their first official language (17%). A large percentage of the community is bilingual speaking both French and English (21%).
Franco-Albertans () are an extended community of French Canadians or French-speaking people living in the Canadian province of Alberta.
French history in Alberta goes back to the fur trade in North America when voyageurs (travelling traders) with the Montreal-based North-West Company arrived in the late 1780s. Along with new arrivals from Canada East, the French continued to make up a large percentage of the workforce in the Hudson’s Bay Company after it took over the NWCo. In 1821, and French was the primary European language spoken in what later became Alberta until the 1870s. 
With unrest growing in the colonies to the south, which would one day grow into the American Revolution, the British were worried that the French-speaking Canadians might also support the growing rebellion. At that time, French-speaking Canadians formed the vast majority of the population of the province of Quebec (more than 99%) and British immigration was not going well. To secure the allegiance of the approximately 90,000 French-speaking Canadians to the British crown, first Governor James Murray and later Governor Guy Carleton promoted the need for change. There was also a need to compromise between the conflicting demands of the French-speaking Canadian subjects and those of newly arrived British subjects. These efforts by the colonial governors eventually resulted in enactment of the Quebec Act of 1774.
In Quebec, about six million French Canadians are native French speakers. 599,225 (7.7% of population) are English-speaking, Anglophones or English-speaking Quebecers, and others are Allophones (literally "other-speakers", meaning, in practice, immigrants who speak neither French nor English at home). In the United States, assimilation to the English language was more significant and very few Americans of French-Canadian ancestry or heritage speak French today.
Canadian French spoken by French Canadians and Quebec French of Quebecois immigrants is also spoken by Canadian Americans and French Canadian Americans in United States across Little Canadas and in many cities of New England. French Canadians living in Canada express their cultural identity using a number of terms. The "Ethnic Diversity Survey" of the 2006 Canadian census found that French-speaking Canadians identified their ethnicity most often as French, French Canadians, Québécois, and Acadian. The latter three were grouped together by Jantzen (2006) as "French New World" ancestries because they originate in Canada.
All these ancestries are represented among French Canadian Americans. Franco-Newfoundlanders speaking Newfoundland French, Franco-Ontarians, Franco-Manitobans, Fransaskois, Franco-Albertans, Franco-Columbians, Franco-Ténois, Franco-Yukonnais, Franco-Nunavois are part of the French Canadian Americans population and speaks their own form of French.
Although English settlement began in Newfoundland in 1610, and the Hudson's Bay Company was chartered in 1670, it was only with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 that France ceded to Great Britain its claims to mainland Nova Scotia and significant British colonization of what would become mainland Canada would begin. Even then, prior to the American Revolution, Nova Scotia was settled largely by planters from New England who took up lands following the deportation of the French-speaking Acadian population, in 1755 in an event known in French to Acadians as "Le Grand Dérangement", one of the critical events in the formation of the Canadian identity. During the period of French hegemony over New France the term "Canadien" referred to the French-speaking inhabitants of 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.
Canadian French is an umbrella term for the distinct varieties of French spoken by francophone Canadians: Québécois (Quebec French), Acadian French, Métis French, and Newfoundland French. Unlike Acadian French and Newfoundland French, the French of Ontario, the Canadian West, and New England all originate from what is now Quebec French and do not constitute distinct varieties from it, though there are some regional differences. French Canadians may also speak either Canadian English or American English, especially if they live in overwhelmingly English-speaking Canadian provinces or in the United States.
Both French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians tend to regard the capacity to speak the other official language as having cultural and economic value, and both groups have indicated that they regard bilingualism as an integral element of the Canadian national identity. Once again, however, there is a marked divergence between the responses of French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians. In a 2003 poll, 75% of Francophones indicated that "having two official languages, English and French" made them proud to be Canadian. Among English-speakers, 55% said that bilingualism made them proud, but far higher percentages (86% and 94%, respectively) indicated that multiculturalism and the Charter of Rights made them feel proud.
According to an official survey run on behalf of the "Collectivité territoriale de Corse" which took place in April 2013, in Corsica the Corsican language has a number of speakers situated between 86,800 and 130,200, out of a total population amounting to 309,693 inhabitants. The percentage of those who have a solid knowledge of the language varies between a minimum of 25 percent in the 25–34 age group and the maximum of 65 percent in the over-65 age group: almost a quarter of the former age group does not understand Corsican, while only a small minority of the older people do not understand it. While 32 percent of the population of northern Corsica speaks Corsican quite well, this percentage drops to 22 percent for South Corsica. Moreover, 10 percent of the population of Corsica speaks only French, while 62 percent speak both French and Corsican. However, only 8 percent of the Corsicans know how to write correctly in Corsican, while about 60 percent of the population does not know how to write in Corsican. While 90 percent of the population is in favor of a Corsican-French bilingualism, 3 percent would like to have Corsican as the only official language in the island, and 7 percent would prefer French in this role.
As of January 2018, the largest population of French American people are in the state of Maine. The state is home to the largest French-speaking population in the country (Lewiston) and the largest concentration of people of French extraction (Madawaska). The second largest state housing French Americans is Louisiana. The largest French-speaking population (in terms of percentage of speakers) in the U.S. is found in St. Martin Parish.
The new Belgian capital remained a mostly Dutch-speaking city, where the inhabitants spoke a local South Brabantian dialect. A minority of French-speaking citizens, mainly those who had immigrated from France during the previous decades, constituted 15% of the population. Despite this, the first mayor of Brussels after the revolution, Nicolas-Jean Rouppe, declared French to be the sole language of administration. The political center of Brussels attracted the economic elite, and Brussels soon acquired French-speaking upper and middle classes. In 1846, 38% of the city declared themselves being French-speaking, while this percentage was 5% in Ghent and 2% in Antwerp. Many supposed French-speakers were actually Flemish bourgeois with Dutch-speaking roots. In 1860, 95% of the Flemish population spoke Dutch, although these people had hardly any economic and political power and deemed a good knowledge of French necessary to attain higher social status and wealth.
Provincially, the largest Ukrainian speaking population resides in Ontario. Ukrainophones there, however, are a small percentage of the population, while on the Prairies the percentage is much higher. Very few Ukrainian speakers are present in either Atlantic and Northern Canada.
In 1918, just before the reforms began, the percentage of francophones in the federal civil service stood at just under 22%. The drop in the percentage of French-speakers was in part due to the fact that the proportion of Canadians who were French-speaking was gradually declining; in the 1921 census, persons of French origin were down to 27.9% of the population. As well, the Unionist government then in power had almost no representation in Quebec, which meant that for several years there were no French-Canadian ministers appointing and promoting their fellow French-speakers.
Norman Canadians are Canadians who can be either French speaking or English speaking. Their ancestors originate from Normandy and they came from, what is called now Upper Normandy, Lower Normandy and the Channel Islands.
Relatively few French Canadians volunteered. The experience of the first contingent suggested that they could expect nothing but ill-treatment as French-speaking Catholics in English-speaking battalions filled with what they perceived as mostly Protestant men and officers who were unable to communicate with them. Young French Canadians seeking to serve, chose, instead, the few traditional "French" regiments of the Canadian militia, such as "Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal", where barracks life was in French, and only the command language was in English. They had to be turned away because the Minister of Militia and his subordinates were obstinate in their refusal to mobilise these traditionally French regiments or to create new ones. However, the government continued to raise its expectations for volunteers, aiming for 150,000 men by 1915. English Canadians did not believe that French Canada was providing a fair share to the war effort. Sam Hughes, in June 1917, informed the House of Commons that of the 432,000 Canadian volunteers fewer than 5% came from French Canada, which made up 28% of the Canadian population at that time. There have been many reasons proposed for the lack of Québécois volunteers; however, many prominent Canadian historians suggest that the Ontario government's move to disallow French language instruction in Regulation 17 as the main reason.
In terms of mother tongue, however, the statistics differ. Because it is more common for Francophone Canadians to switch to using English as their main language later in life, than it is for Anglophone Canadians to switch to French, the percentage of the population that has French as a mother tongue is higher than the percentage of the population that uses French as their main language at home. With the mother tongue statistic, the township is 52% anglophone and 43% francophone. In Embrun, 58% have French mother tongue and 38% have English mother tongue. In Russell, 75% have English mother tongue and 19% have French mother tongue.
Although most of the population of Chatham-Kent is English-speaking, a few of its communities and Catholic parishes were settled by francophone (French-speaking) farmers in the mid-nineteenth century. These include Pain Court, Tilbury and Grande Pointe, where French is still spoken by a significant percentage of the population. These communities are designated French language service areas under Ontario's French Language Services Act.
Iqaluit has the most Inuit people in both numbers (3,900) and percentages (59.1%), of all Canadian cities with populations greater than 5,000. The racial make up is:
There is no "majority mother tongue" in Iqaluit, as 45.4% reported their mother tongue as being English, and 45.4% also reported their mother tongue as Inuktitut. 97.2% of Iqalummiuts can speak English, however, whereas only 53.1% can speak Inuktitut. French was the mother tongue of 4.8% of the population, which is the same figure of the population who can speak the language. As of 2012, "Pirurvik, Iqaluit’s Inuktitut language training centre, has a new goal: to train instructors from Nunavut communities to teach Inuktitut in different ways and in their own dialects when they return home."
The merger of the two Canadas in 1840, with political power divided evenly between the former Lower and Upper Canadas, created a political structure that eventually exacerbated tensions between the French and English-speaking populations and which would prove an enduring feature of Canadian identity. As the population of English-speaking and largely Protestant Canada West grew to surpass that of majority French-speaking Catholic Canada East, the population of Canada West began to feel that its interests were becoming subservient to the francophone population of Canada East. George Brown, founder of "The Globe" newspaper (forerunner of today's "The Globe and Mail") and a Father of Confederation wrote that the position of Canada West had become "a base vassalage to French-Canadian Priestcraft." For its part, the French Canadians distrusted the growing anti-Catholic 'British' population of Canada West and sought a structure that could provide at least some control over its own affairs through a Provincial legislature founded on principles of responsible government.
Depending on the principal period of immigration to Canada and other factors, ethnic groups (other than British Isles, French, and Aboriginal ones) vary in their percentage of native speakers of English. For example, while a roughly equal number of Canadians have at least partial Ukrainian and Chinese ancestry, 82% of Ukrainian Canadians speak English as their sole mother tongue, and only 17% of Chinese Canadians do (though this rises to 34% in the 0 to 14 age group). As the number of second and third-generation Chinese Canadians increases, their weight within the English-speaking population can also be expected to increase. It should also be borne in mind that some percentage of any minority ethnic group will adopt French, particularly in Quebec.
French Canadians (including those who are no longer French-speaking) constitute the second largest ethnic group in Canada, behind those of English ancestry, and ahead of those of Scottish and Irish heritage; there is nevertheless a distinction between those identifying as French Canadians and those simply identifying as French. In total, those whose ethnic origins are French Canadian, French, Québécois and Acadian number up to 11.9 million people or comprising 33.78% of the Canadian population.