Over the past fifty years, the proportion of Quebecers speaking both English and French has increased steadily, from **** percent in 1971 to almost half the population (**** percent) in 2021. The rate of English-French bilingualism, on the other hand, has declined in the rest of the country: outside Quebec, just over ten percent of people were bilingual in English and French in 2001, compared to *** percent two decades later.

In 2021, French was the first language spoken by over 71 percent of the population of Montréal, Québec in Canada. 20.4 percent of the city's residents had English as their first language, 6.7 percent used both English and French as their primary language, and 1.6 percent of the population spoke another language. That same year, 46.4 percent of people living in the province of Québec could speak both English and French.

Data on the knowledge of official languages by the population of Canada and Canada outside Quebec, and of all provinces and territories, for Census years 1951 to 2021.

Data on primary or secondary schooling in French in Canada, type of French program attended and mother tongue for the population outside of Quebec, in private households in Canada outside of Quebec, provinces and territories, census divisions and census subdivisions.

This service shows the percentage of population, excluding institutional residents, with knowledge of English and French for Canada by 2016 census subdivision. The data is from the Census Profile, Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 98-316-X2016001. Knowledge of official languages refers to whether the person can conduct a conversation in English only, French only, in both languages or in neither language. For a child who has not yet learned to speak, this includes languages that the child is learning to speak at home. For additional information refer to 'Knowledge of official languages' in the 2016 Census Dictionary. For additional information refer to 'Knowledge of official languages' in the 2016 Census Dictionary. To have a cartographic representation of the ecumene with this socio-economic indicator, it is recommended to add as the first layer, the “NRCan - 2016 population ecumene by census subdivision” web service, accessible in the data resources section below.

The statistic reflects the distribution of languages in Canada in 2022. In 2022, 87.1 percent of the total population in Canada spoke English as their native tongue.

Data on English spoken at home by French spoken at home, Indigenous language spoken at home, other non-official language spoken at home, mother tongue, age and gender for the population excluding institutional residents for Canada, provinces and territories, census metropolitan areas and census agglomerations with parts.

This map shows the percentage of the Canadian population with knowledge of French. In the 1996 Census, knowledge of French was determined by a question about the ability to conduct a conversation in one or both languages. It should be noted that this question measured language knowledge rather than actual use of language.

In 2021, most of the population of the city of Montreal, located in the Canadian province of Quebec, could speak both English and French. In fact, approximately 1.23 million men and 1.68 million women were bilingual. Of those who spoke only one of the official languages, the majority (1.43 million people) spoke only French. In addition, more than 68,400 people did not know either language, with women outnumbering men.

This map shows the percentage of the Canadian population whose mother tongue was French. The 1996 Census defines mother tongue as the first language a person learned at home in childhood and still understood at the time of the census. The 1996 Census showed that 8.9 million Canadians could conduct a conversation in French (31%), 6.4 million spoke French most often at home (23%) and 6.7 million had French as their mother tongue (24%).

According to the Canadian government, approximately 2.54 million people residing in Montreal, in the province of Quebec, had French as their mother tongue in 2021. About 474,730 of them had English, the second official language, as their birth language. However, there were more people that year ( 522,255) whose mother tongue was an Indo-European language, such as German, Russian or Polish.

Contained within the 3rd Edition (1957) of the Atlas of Canada is a map that shows two condensed maps which use dots and proportional circles to illustrate the distribution of population of French and British origin, respectively, according to the 1951 census of Canada. Each map is accompanied by a pie chart which shows the British origin and French origin percentage population distribution by province and territory. For Canadian census purposes, a person's origin or cultural group is traced through the father to the paternal ancestor on first arrival to this continent. The term 'British' embraces all those of British Isles origin, that is, it includes those from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands and the Republic of Ireland.

Introduction

Welcome to the Canadian French General Conversation Speech Dataset — a rich, linguistically diverse corpus purpose-built to accelerate the development of French speech technologies. This dataset is designed to train and fine-tune ASR systems, spoken language understanding models, and generative voice AI tailored to real-world Canadian French communication.

Curated by FutureBeeAI, this 30 hours dataset offers unscripted, spontaneous two-speaker conversations across a wide array of real-life topics. It enables researchers, AI developers, and voice-first product teams to build robust, production-grade French speech models that understand and respond to authentic Canadian accents and dialects.

Speech Data

The dataset comprises 30 hours of high-quality audio, featuring natural, free-flowing dialogue between native speakers of Canadian French. These sessions range from informal daily talks to deeper, topic-specific discussions, ensuring variability and context richness for diverse use cases.

Topic Diversity

The dataset spans a wide variety of everyday and domain-relevant themes. This topic diversity ensures the resulting models are adaptable to broad speech contexts.

Transcription

Each audio file is paired with a human-verified, verbatim transcription available in JSON format.

These transcriptions are production-ready, enabling seamless integration into ASR model pipelines or conversational AI workflows.

Metadata

The dataset comes with granular metadata for both speakers and recordings:

Such metadata helps developers fine-tune model training and supports use-case-specific filtering or demographic analysis.

Usage and Applications

This dataset is a versatile resource for multiple French speech and language AI applications:

Data on languages used at work by the population of Canada and Canada outside Quebec, and of all provinces and territories, for Census years 2001 to 2016.

The 2006 Census data showed that Anglophones, that is the population whose mother tongue is English, made up the majority of the population in Canada, about 57.8%. This was the case for all provinces and territories except Quebec, where the majority of the population reported French as mother tongue. In total, 22.1% of the population in Canada were Francophones, which is the population with French as their mother tongue. Allophones, the population who reported a non-official language as mother tongue, made up 20%.

In 1996, 67% of Canada’s population were able to conduct a conversation in English only, 14% in French only and 17% in both of these languages. Around 2% of people enumerated reported not knowing either of these two languages. This map shows the percentage of the Canadian population in 1996 who were able to conduct a conversation in both official languages, English and French.

This table is part of a series of tables that present a portrait of Canada based on the various census topics. The tables range in complexity and levels of geography. Content varies from a simple overview of the country to complex cross-tabulations; the tables may also cover several censuses.

This table is part of a series of tables that present a portrait of Canada based on the various census topics. The tables range in complexity and levels of geography. Content varies from a simple overview of the country to complex cross-tabulations; the tables may also cover several censuses.

This table is part of a series of tables that present a portrait of Canada based on the various census topics. The tables range in complexity and levels of geography. Content varies from a simple overview of the country to complex cross-tabulations; the tables may also cover several censuses.

The statistic presents data on the weekly reach of select media in the French Canada in 2017, broken down by gender. In the measured period magazine media reached ** percent of the female adult Canadian population in the French provinces every week and reached ** percent of the male population.