For example, astheure, a colloquial compression of the phrase à cette heure (at this time) is being replaced by the more standard maintenant (now). As is only right, the schools train their students to use the standard register. According to linguistics scholar Julie Auger, these developments suggest that in Québec, French may become the main adopted language of members of linguistic minorities. But during this period, France also established a network of fortifications and trading posts beyond the St. Lawrence valley, especially around the Great Lakes. Many of the words that Québec French has borrowed from Aboriginal languages express North American realities that could not have been denoted by equivalent French terms. As noted earlier, by 2011, nearly 70 per cent of Quebecers who had English as their mother tongue could express themselves in French, which was almost 30 percentage points higher than in 1971. In Saskatchewan, the names of several francophone communities evoke the places from which the European colonists came, such as Saint-Brieux, Lisieux, Cantal and Domrémy. The sheer number of Mandarin, English and Spanish speakers is the most common justification for studying these languages. Bilingualism Among Canadian Anglophones Outside Québec. The growth of bilingual education has probably contributed to this increase, but research by Hélène Blondeau, Naomi Nagy, Gillian Sankoff and Pierrette Thibault on how Montréal anglophones learn French shows that long-term interactions with francophones outside of school also help these anglophones to become bilingual. In Oceania, French is the official language of the Pacific island of Vanuatu, and it’s also spoken across French Polynesia, and in the French collectivities of New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna. Encyclopedia of French Cultural Heritage in North AmericaExplore the rich heritage of francophone communities in North America. And how many people speak French in the U.S.? The second trend, standardization, involves the disappearance of certain traits of ordinary Québec French and their replacement by standard French equivalents. According to linguist Robert Papen, there are now only a few thousand francophone Métis left, living mainly in Manitoba. But in these same provinces, the proportion of people with French as their mother tongue who can express themselves in English is very high: 71 per cent in New Brunswick and well over 80 per cent in the other provinces. (How are you?) The first of these explorers was Giovanni de Verrazano who reached the Americas in 1524. The French language shines in the field of language learning. French Spoken in Western Canadian Communities Founded by Francophone Immigrants from Europe. Regarding knowledge of Canada’s official languages, the 2011 census shows that in Québec, 38.2 per cent of people with French as their mother tongue can express themselves in English, while 67 per cent of people with English as their mother tongue and 75 per cent of people with a mother tongue other than English or French can express themselves in French. Raymond Mougeon, "Maintien et évolution du français dans les provinces du Canada anglophone," in Salikoko Mufwene and Cécile Vigouroux, eds., Colonisation, globalisation et vitalité du français (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2014), 211-276. We mentioned that French is spoken across five continents, but we’ve only mentioned three. Manitoba being one of … The francophone members of the Métis people are descendants of unions that took place between French colonists from the St. Lawrence valley and the Great Lakes region and Aboriginal women during the time of the fur trade in what were then called the Pays d’en haut (“upper country”). Métis French is of considerable scientific interest. Traces of the dialects of these regions can still be found in certain lexical particularities of Québec French. francophone communities in Canada’s western provinces, Hélène Blondeau, Annette Boudreau, Yves Frenette, Anne Gilbert, France Martineau, Françoise Mougeon, Robert Papen. Other examples include the use of bailler instead of donner (to give), the use of ne... point instead of ne... pas to negate a verb, and the use of the sound /u/ (as in “spoon”) in place of the open o [ɔ] in words such as pomme (apple) and homard (lobster). Another significant piece of language legislation was the federal Official Languages Act, first passed in 1969 and updated in 1988. Canada’s commitment to bilingualism is written into its Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and both English and French are recognized as official languages. Corpuses of oral language gathered in various parts of the vast area where Acadians now live show that Acadian French varies from one region to another. But starting in the 1830s and continuing throughout the first half of the 20th century, overpopulation and the development of capitalism in several parts of Québec led thousands of Quebecers to leave the province, often permanently, in search of land or jobs that they could no longer find at home. I wondered how many people can speak Dutch. Outside Québec, starting in the 1960s, several jurisdictions in the nine provinces and two territories of English-speaking Canada took steps to recognize certain language rights for their francophone minorities, including the right to education in French, which many of them had previously abolished (see Ontario Schools Question; Manitoba Schools Question; North-West Schools Question; New Brunswick School Question). Analogous differences can be found in written French, though they are not so marked as in oral French. If you're wondering why do Canadians speak French, this video is for you. Really, if you live anywhere other than Quebec, you can get by fine with English. As in the Democratic Republic of Congo, French is often used as a lingua franca in countries with multiple local languages, and it’s also often employed as the language of administration and higher education. Gilles Forlot, "Portrait sociolinguistique de migrants français à Toronto », in Normand Labrie and Gilles Forlot, eds., L’enjeu de la langue française en Ontario français (Sudbury: Prise de parole, 1999), 197-238. In a study of the speech of immigrants from France who were living in Toronto, Gilles Forlot found that their French diverged from the French of their mother country in some respects that were attributable more to the influence of English or to language attrition than to their having adopted any traits of Canadian French. The primary purpose of all of these measures was to encourage non-French-speaking immigrants to integrate into the francophone community rather than into the anglophone community, as they had tended to do in the past, especially in Montréal. Lau… Nationwide, there are a further 2 million speakers of French as a second language, which means approximately 30% of the population of 36 million is conversant in French. French, like Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish, is a Romance language. Did you know that French is one of the fastest growing languages in the world and that about half of all French speakers live in Africa? In the three other Atlantic provinces, only about half of all people who have French as their mother tongue also have it as the language that they speak most often at home, and provincial government support for French does not go far beyond the education system. Annette Boudreau, "Discours, nominations des langues et idéologies linguistiques," in Davy Bigot, Michael Friesner and Mireille Tremblay, eds., Les français d’ici et d’aujourd’hui. It is the second (or third) most studied language in the world and has about 120 million active learners at the moment! Several languages are used in Canada. For example, in New Brunswick, 82 per cent of francophone parents send their children to French-language primary schools, but the remainder send their children to English-language schools. In fact, according to the 2016 census, French is the native language of around 7.2 million Canadians—or about 20 percent of the total population. For example, the French spoken by ordinary people in Québec is quite different from the register used by broadcast journalists at Société Radio-Canada. Such expansion remained relatively modest until the 19th century. French is the mother tongue of 22.3 percent of the Canadian population or about 7 million Canadians. French Canadians may also speak either Canadian English or American En… Examples of innovations — the third category of particularities of Québec French — include poudrerie for wind-blown snow, pâté chinois for the Québec version of shepherd’s pie, and the terms gardienne d’enfants and gardiennage where continental French uses the anglicisms babysitter and baby-sitting. These commonalities reflect the fact that Acadian French and Québec French date back to the same period of French colonial history. Signing up enhances your TCE experience with the ability to save items to your personal reading list, and access the interactive map. Mougeon, R., French Language in Canada (2015). The country of Haiti itself, which is also located in North America, accounts for a further 10 million French speakers. Canada's linguistic make-up is becoming more diverse, as the share of Canadians who speak a language other than French or English at home is increasing. In fact, in places where francophones are only a small minority, most francophone parents rely mostly on the schools to transmit French to their children, who are thus more comfortable in English than in French. A good example is the use of the adverb juste (just) or seulement (only) between the subject and the verb, as in Il juste travaille le matin (He just/only works mornings), which is acceptable in English, but not in French. The column headings are: official language and population in percentage. French is the mother tongue of 3.1% of the population (1,267 people) French is the first official language of 3% of the population (1,240 people) Education. The statistics from the 2011 census show that nearly 40 years after the adoption of the Charter of the French Language, French was exerting significant pressure on language minorities in Québec. Thanks for contributing to The Canadian Encyclopedia. Of course, some areas have more French speakers than others. Also, a 2006 survey on the vitality of official language minorities showed that outside Québec, French-language schools do not attract all of the francophone students who could attend them. Mougeon, Raymond. Decline of French in the Home and Vitality of Francophone Minorities. 11.2% of the population (1,490,390 people) can speak both English and French - 7% increase since 2011! Acadian French is also the basis of Cajun French, spoken all the way down in Louisiana. Most likely, part of the explanation for the continued heterogeneity of the French dialects spoken in these mixed communities is that these two groups of francophones began to live together only relatively recently. 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