Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: How many people speak French in Ontario?
There are more than 600,000 francophones residing in Ontario.[2] 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.[1] 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.
French is the second most common language in Canada, after English, and both are official languages at the federal level. It is the first language of 9.5 million people or 29% and the second language for 2.07 million or 6% of the entire population of Canada. French is the sole official language in the province of Quebec, being the mother tongue for some 7 million people, or almost 80% (2006 Census) of the province. About 95% of the people of Quebec speak French as either their first or second language, and for some as their third language. Quebec is also home to the city of Montreal, which is the world's 4th-largest French-speaking city, by number of first language speakers. 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. Furthermore, while French is not an official language in Ontario, the French Language Services Act ensures that provincial services are to be available in the language. The Act applies to areas of the province where there are significant Francophone communities, namely Eastern Ontario and Northern Ontario. Elsewhere, sizable French-speaking minorities are found in southern Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and the Port au Port Peninsula in Newfoundland and Labrador, where the unique Newfoundland French dialect was historically spoken. Smaller pockets of French speakers exist in all other provinces. The city of Ottawa, the Canadian capital, is also effectively bilingual, as it is on the other side of a river from Quebec, opposite the major city of Gatineau, and is required to offer governmental services in French as well as English.
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.
River Canard is one of the oldest European settlements in North America, as it was part of early French colonial settlement in the 18th century related to Fort Detroit and the Detroit River. Their descendants, known as Fort Detroit French, still live in the area. They were joined in southwestern Ontario by more numerous French-speaking migrants, known as Canadian French, who came to the area in the 19th century, primarily from Quebec. The ethnic French largely formed two communities in Ontario because of their different histories, but they would sometimes collaborate of issues of joint importance, such as French instruction in schools and French language in churches with French-speaking congregations. 
The township is predominantly English-speaking with a significant French-speaking minority. 61% of the population speaks English most often at home, while 36% speaks French most often at home. The remaining 3% speak either both languages equally, or speak a non-official language most often. The different parts of the township have different distributions of language, however. Embrun has a slight francophone majority, with 50% French-speaking and 46% English-speaking. Russell, on the other hand, has a stronger anglophone majority, with 86% English-speaking and 12% French-speaking.
Abroad, the French language is spoken in many different countries – in particular the former French colonies. Nevertheless, speaking French is distinct from being a French citizen. Thus, "francophonie", or the speaking of French, must not be confused with French citizenship or ethnicity. For example, French speakers in Switzerland are not "French citizens".
Few people today speak Meänkieli as their only language. Estimates of how many people speak Meänkieli vary from 30,000 to 70,000, of whom most live in Norrbotten. Many people in the northern parts of Sweden understand some Meänkieli, but fewer people speak it regularly. People with Meänkieli roots are often referred to as Tornedalians although the Finnish-speaking part of Norrbotten is a far larger area than the Torne River Valley; judging by the names of towns and places, the Finnish-speaking part of Norrbotten stretches as far west as the city of Gällivare.
Most French people speak the French language as their mother tongue, but certain languages like Norman, Occitan, Auvergnat, Corsican, Euskara, French Flemish and Breton remain spoken in certain regions (see Language policy in France). There have also been periods of history when a majority of French people had other first languages (local languages such as Occitan, Catalan, Alsatian, West Flemish, Lorraine Franconian, Gallo, Picard or Ch'timi and Arpitan). Today, many immigrants speak another tongue at home.
The town has a French-speaking majority, with a significant English-speaking minority. According to the 2006 Census, 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.
Most people are French speaking. Many Irish and other ethnic groups settled in this heavily forested area in the 19th century, along with folks from nearby Québec. Since the Irish were Catholic like the French speakers, there was a great deal of inter-marriage. Today, you would find many people with Irish and Scottish surnames who are entirely French-speaking here, while others with French surnames speak only English. Connors is a place where people made their living from forestry rather than farming. This whole area is quite remote from major population centres, and is now having major economic problems because there is no other livelihood except logging and sawmills. Many of the younger people on both sides of the border have been leaving for better job prospects in bigger cities (Bangor or Portland, ME or Montreal and Quebec City, or Fredericton and Saint John, New Brunswick and sometimes even Halifax, Nova Scotia).
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.
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.
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.
Compared to other provinces, New Brunswick has a relatively even split of French and English population.
As a comparison, the minority language communities of Ontario and Quebec (Franco-Ontarians and English-speaking Quebecers respectively) make up less than 10% of those provinces' populations. With both official language communities so strongly represented, New Brunswick is home to both French and English language hospitals and healthcare networks, school systems, universities, and media. The province also has a relatively high proportion of people who state that they can speak both official languages, with about 246,000 people, or 33.2% of the population reporting the ability to speak both English and French (though Francophones make up two-thirds of those who are bilingual).
However, in Cabinda, wedged between two French-speaking countries — the DRC and the Congo — many people speak French as well as, or better than, Portuguese. In fact, of the literate population, 90 percent speak French while 10 percent speak Portuguese. Also, the Angolan Bakongo who were exiled in the Democratic Republic of the Congo usually speak better French and Lingala than Portuguese and Kikongo.
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.
Nowadays there are instances of families speaking only French to their children in the hope of helping their social advancement. With French schooling and French-language television, many young people turn to French or use many French words when speaking Shimaore and Kibushi, leading some to fear that these native languages of Mayotte could either disappear or become some sort of French-based creole.
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.
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.
The language of Emae is a language spoken in the villages of Makatea and Tongamea on Emae in the country of Vanuatu. Most of the Emae people speak Emae, North Efate (Nguna), English, French and Bislama. Less than 1% of the people who speak Emae as their native language are literate in the language, while 50% to 70% are literate in their second language, whether it be Nguna, English, French or Bislama. Today, only around 400 people speak Emae, mainly in Makatea and Tongamea, 250 more than in the 1960s - around 150 speakers. According to Lewis, Emae is still underused by many of the people in the area, but 50% of children know and speak Emae (2014), and children speaking Emae will help the language thrive.
The French Language Services Act () (the "Act") is a law in the province of Ontario, Canada which is intended to protect the rights of Franco-Ontarians, or French-speaking people, in the province.
Sartre noted when Wehrmacht soldiers asked Parisians politely in their German-accented French for directions, people usually felt embarrassed and ashamed as they tried their best to help out the Wehrmacht which led Sartre to remark "We could not be "natural"". French was a language widely taught in German schools and most Germans could speak at least some French. Sartre himself always found it difficult when a Wehrmacht soldier asked him for directions, usually saying he did not know where it was that the soldier wanted to go, but still felt uncomfortable as the very act of speaking to the Wehrmacht meant he had been complicit in the Occupation. Ousby wrote: "But, in however humble a fashion, everyone still had to decide how they were going to cope with life in a fragmenting society ... So Sartre's worries ... about how to react when a German soldier stopped him in the street and asked politely for directions were not as fussily inconsequential as they might sound at first. They were emblematic of how the dilemmas of the Occupation presented themselves in daily life". Sartre wrote the very "correctness" of the Germans caused moral corruption in many people who used the "correct" behavior of the Germans as an excuse for passivity, and the very act of simply trying to live one's day-to-day existence without challenging the occupation aided the "New Order in Europe", which depended upon the passivity of ordinary people to accomplish its goals.
Russell is a predominantly English-speaking community, although with a sizeable French-speaking minority. 87% of the community speaks English at home, while 11% speak French at home.
A total of 10,804,304 people claimed French ancestry in the 2010 census although other sources have recorded as many as 13 million people claiming this ancestry. Most French-speaking Americans are of this heritage, but there are also significant populations not of French descent who speak it as well, including those from Belgium, Switzerland, Haiti and numerous Francophone African countries.
When the English-speaking United Empire Loyalists arrived in Canada after the American Revolution, they naturally settled along the narrow strip north of the St. Lawrence River and lower Great Lakes, where good farm land was available and larger boats could be used for transportation, and these people formed the English-speaking nucleus of what would later be Ontario (by contrast, many of the Ontario towns along the old fur-trading and logging route to the north, through the Ottawa Valley and westward, still have significant French-speaking populations). Initially, Kingston was the principal city of the English half of the corridor, but eventually Toronto outgrew it. 