It is presumed that the first humans migrated from Siberia to North America approximately twelve thousand years ago, where they then moved southwards to warmer lands. It was not until many centuries later that humans returned to the north and began to settle regions that are now part of Canada. Despite a few short-lived Viking settlements on Newfoundland around the turn of the first millennium CE, the Italian explorer Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), became the first European to explore the coast of North America in the late 1400s. The French and British crowns both made claims to areas of Canada throughout the sixteenth century, but real colonization and settlement did not begin until the early seventeenth century. Over the next 150 years, France and Britain competed to take control of the booming fur and fishing trade, and to expand their overseas empires. In the Seven Year's War, Britain eventually defeated the French colonists in North America, through superior numbers and a stronger agriculture resources in the southern colonies, and the outcome of the war saw France cede practically all of it's colonies in North America to the British.

Increased migration and declining native populations

The early 1800s saw a large influx of migrants into Canada, with the Irish Potato Famine bringing the first wave of mass-migration to the country, with further migration coming from Scandinavia and Northern Europe. It is estimated that the region received just shy of one million migrants from the British Isles alone, between 1815 and 1850, which helped the population grow to 2.5 million in the mid-1800s and 5.5 million in 1900. It is also estimated that infectious diseases killed around 25 to 33 percent of all Europeans who migrated to Canada before 1891, and around a third of the Canadian population is estimated to have emigrated southwards to the United States in the 1871-1896 period. From the time of European colonization until the mid-nineteenth century, the native population of Canada dropped from roughly 500,000 (some estimates put it as high as two million) to just over 100,000; this was due to a mixture of disease, starvation and warfare, instigated by European migration to the region. The native population was generally segregated and oppressed until the second half of the 1900s; Native Canadians were given the vote in 1960, and, despite their complicated and difficult history, the Canadian government has made significant progress in trying to include indigenous cultures in the country's national identity in recent years. As of 2020, Indigenous Canadians make up more than five percent of the total Canadian population, and a higher birth rate means that this share of the population is expected to grow in the coming decades.

Independence and modern Canada

Canadian independence was finally acknowledged in 1931 by the Statute of Westminster, putting it on equal terms with the United Kingdom within the Commonwealth; virtually granting independence and sovereignty until the Canada Act of 1982 formalized it. Over the past century, Canada has had a relatively stable political system and economy (although it was hit particularly badly by the Wall Street Crash of 1929). Canada entered the First World War with Britain, and as an independent Allied Power in the Second World War; Canadian forces played pivotal roles in a number of campaigns, notably Canada's Hundred Days in WWI, and the country lost more than 100,000 men across both conflicts. The economy boomed in the aftermath of the Second World War, and a stream of socially democratic programs such as universal health care and the Canadian pension plan were introduced, which contributed to a rise in the standard of living. The post war period also saw various territories deciding to join Canada, with Newfoundland joining in 1949, and Nunavut in 1999. Today Canada is among the most highly ranked in countries in terms of civil liberties, quality of life and economic growth. It promotes and welcomes immigrants from all over the world and, as a result, it has one of the most ethnically diverse and multicultural populations of any country in the world. As of 2020, Canada's population stands at around 38 million people, and continues to grow due to high migration levels and life expectancy, and a steady birth rate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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%.

Data tables on the social and economic conditions in Pre-Confederation Canada from the first census in 1665 to Confederation in 1867. This dataset is one of three that cover the history of the censuses in Quebec. These tables cover New France for the years 1676-1754. For census data for the years 1825-1861, see the Lower Canada dataset; for census data for the years 1765-1790, see the Province of Quebec dataset. The tables were transcribed from the fourth volume of the 1871 Census of Canada: Reprint of the Censuses of Canada, 1665-1871, available online from Statistics Canada, Canadiana, Government of Canada Publications, and the Internet Archive. Note on terminology: Due to the nature of some of the data sources, terminology may include language that is problematic and/or offensive to researchers. Certain vocabulary used to refer to racial, ethnic, religious and cultural groups is specific to the time period when the data were collected. When exploring or using these data do so in the context of historical thinking concepts – analyzing not only the content but asking questions of who shaped the content and why.

Data on type and level of French program attended, number of years of primary or secondary schooling in a regular French program in a French-language school 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 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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

Statistics Canada Census Data from 2021. This file geodatabase includes extra data for the language at home total, male, and female populations provided by Statistics Canada joined with the census tracts. The extra tables include the following:Language spoken at home for the total population by ageLanguage spoken at home for the total population where English is their first official language spoken by ageLanguage spoken at home for the total population where French is their first official language spoken by ageLanguage spoken at home for the total population where English and French are their first official languages spoken by ageLanguage spoken at home for the total population where neither English nor French are their first official language spoken by ageThe geodatabase also includes tables of the above topics for the male and female populations.NOTE: Only languages where there were one or more respondents were included. For a full list of languages included in the census, please refer to the List of Languages by Statistics Canada.For more information on definitions of terms used in the tables and other notes, refer to Statistics Canada's Languages Reference Guide and Statistics Canada's 2021 Census.

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.

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.

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.

Depicted on this map is the extent of New France at its territorial height circa 1740 prior to its great territorial losses to British North America. Also shown on the map are the territorial claims, administrative divisions, and the distribution of population and settlement (including fur trading posts) circa 1740. This map along with British North America circa 1823 shows the settlement and population in Canada for two important periods in Canadian history prior to Confederation.

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%).