Introduction

Portrait of Official-Language Minorities in Canada

Catalogue number: Catalogue number: 11-629-x

Issue number: 2015010

Release date: April 17, 2014
Introduction - Transcript

Description of visuals

In Canada, English and French have the status of official languages.

(Seventy languages appear on the screen.)

In the census, Canadians report more than 200 languages as a mother tongue or as the main language they use at home. This great linguistic diversity is evolving in a context of linguistic duality.

(A visual with five female and five male figures appears on the screen; two of these figures become less saturated in colour to represent 8 out of 10 people.)

About 98% of Canada's population can manage a conversation in either English or French, 80% have one of these two languages

(A visual with five female and five male figures appears on the screen.)

as their mother tongue, and close to 94% speak one of them at least regularly at home.

(A visual with many female and male figures appears on the screen. 6 of these figures become less saturated in colour.)

At the national level, French is the minority official language.

(A visual with two female and two male figures appears on the screen; three of them are less saturated in colour.)

Nearly one in four people has French as their mother tongue or as their home language;

(A visual with five female and five male figures appears on the screen.)

three out of 10 Canadians can speak it. At the provincial level, French is very much the majority language in Quebec, whereas in all the other provinces and the territories, it has minority status. Only Quebec has a minority Anglophone population.

(A map of Canada appears on the screen and scrolls from left to right. The map shows female and male figures in each province.)

In Canada, nearly 1 million Francophones live outside Quebec. They live in provinces or territories where English is the language of the majority of the population. In Quebec, where French is the majority language, a roughly equal number of Anglophones make up the province's linguistic minority.

(The Statistics Canada logo appears on the screen.)

In order to support the development of these minority-language communities, Statistics Canada has published, in recent years, a series of provincial and territorial portraits of official-language minorities in Canada - these portraits are of Francophones outside Quebec and Anglophones in Quebec.

These portraits provide a wide range of statistics from Canadian censuses and from the Survey on the Vitality of Official-Language Minorities, conducted by Statistics Canada in 2006.

(A list of topics scrolls from top to bottom: demography, vitality, births, bilingualism, belonging, immigration, education, community, language transfers, access to health care, language of use and culture.)

These data cover various subjects of interest, both demographic and socioeconomic.

(A magnifying glass appears on the screen, followed by a visual of women and men.)

What are the main findings in these statistics? What are the main trends that characterize official-language minority communities in Canada? How do these communities see their future? What are their main challenges?

In the next few minutes, we'll try to answer these questions by summarizing these portraits of official-language minorities.

(The image fades into the Canada wordmark against a black background.)


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