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Knowledge of official languages
Number Percentage
Total 872,450 100.0
English only 522,980 59.9
French only 12,915 1.5
English and French 324,695 37.2
Neither English nor French 11,860 1.4
"In Ottawa, 62.4% of the population reported English only as mother tongue, 14.2% reported French only, and 20.4% reported a non-official language only, in 2011. In 2011, 74.8% of the population spoke only English most often at home, 9.9% spoke only French and 10.5% spoke only a non-official language."
French is heard on the street quite frequently, at least downtown and east of downtown in particular. Mostly you'd hear English, but you'd hear a lot of other languages too. Gatineau's a francophone city, although there's a small anglo minority there.
I remember hearing an English Canadian saying that he'd heard that some minority French Canadians who know English will say that they don't so as to pressure governments to spend more on French language services. Whether what he heard is true or not, I can certainly understand that there could be a motive to do so. .
A few years ago, there was a move by a minority francophone group (not sure if it was the FCFA or AFO or someone else) in English Canada asking its people to answer they spoke only French on the census. Precisely for that idea you mentioned, or at least to avoid getting French services scaled back with the excuse that "they all speak English anyway". It was micro-phenomenon though only for one census and only outside Quebec. I doubt it had much of an effect on the language knowledge stats overall.
Thanks. The thread was started before those stats were released this summer.
One thing is that I am still surprised by the French only number of 12,680. Since Ottawa has about 100,000 francophones that means 12% of them can't speak English. Hard to believe this is possible given that there aren't any areas anymore within Ottawa city limits where francophones are the majority, and therefore where you can do your grocery shopping, errands, etc. only in French.
I'd think the French only share of the francophone population would be half that: maybe around 6%.
With this thought in mind why do i need to speak French, All my social activities are in English with friends and family, all my social media is in English,all vacations are spent outside Quebec.
While i spent 30+ years speaking French at work i've been retired now for 10 years and my French speaking skills have declined substantially as i have no social connection with French social life, whats even more irritating is when i do speak French to some one in public they invariably come back to me in English ,
Likewise if a unilingual French speaker works out of the public's sight, like a restaurant dish washer for example.
They still need to go buy groceries, put gas in the car, order their coffee, talk to the cable installation guy, talk to a paramedic, a cop or a bus driver...
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