French language in Canada French language in Canada French is the mother tongue of about 7.2 million Canadians (20.6% of the Canadian population, second to English at 56%) according to Census Canada 2016. Most native speakers of the French language in Canada live in Quebec, where French is the majority official language. 77% of Quebec's population are native francophones, and 95% of the population speak French as their first or second language. Additionally, about one million native francophones live in other provinces, forming a sizable minority in New Brunswick, which is officially a bilingual province, where about one-third of the population are francophone. There
Charter of the French Language of the OQLF was criticized by a columnist of "The Gazette" who alleged that there was a "totalitarian mindset in the bureaucracy". The columnist complained of sections of the report which described the continued prevalence of languages other than French in two-thirds of Montreal's households as an "alarming" trend that would present a formidable challenge to francophones in Montreal. In reality, the report judged alarming the fact that adoption of English as home language by allophones grew faster than the adoption of French as home language. The use of the notwithstanding clause in the 1990s to circumvent the Canadian Charter