Plan: English – speaking countries: Australia. Canadian English. New Zeland English. English – speaking countries: Australia

Canadian English
English is one of Canada’s two official languages. According to the 2016 Canadian census, English is the mother tongue of approximately 19.5 million people, or 57 per cent of the population, and the first official language of about 26 million people, or 75 per cent of the Canadian population.

English is the majority language in every Canadian province and territory except Quebec (which has a French-speaking majority) and Nunavut (which has an Inuit language majority who speak Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun). In Quebec, English is the mother tongue of 8.1 per cent of the population, and the first official language of 13.7 percent of the population.

Within Quebec, the proportion of English-speakers (or anglophones) has declined sharply from the 19th century, when it was about 25 per cent. A higher birthrate among French-speakers (or francophones) and the departure of many anglophones to pursue better economic opportunities in other provinces gradually reduced that proportion to about 14 per cent by the mid-20th century. Beginning in the 1970s, a more dramatic reduction was prompted by political developments. The provincial government introduced language laws designed to protect the vitality of French by restricting the use of English in business, education, government and public signage; English now has no official status at the provincial level in Quebec (see Quebec Language Policy). At the same time, many francophones began calling for the separation of Quebec from Canada. Most anglophones objected to the language laws and opposed separation. Many responded to the conflict by leaving Quebec; by the 1990s, an exodus of close to 200,000 anglophones had reduced Montreal’s English-speaking community by one-third. Despite these losses, English is still the mother tongue of about 8 per cent of Quebec’s population, and 44.5 per cent of the population report being able to speak both English and French. In greater Montreal, where the majority of Quebec’s English-speakers now live, English is the mother tongue of 13.2 per cent of the metropolitan population (533,845 people).
Even where English is the majority language, it often coexists with other languages. In Toronto and Vancouver, high levels of immigration from non–English-speaking countries have reduced the proportion of native speakers of English to just over half of the metropolitan population. It should also be remembered that not all native speakers of English in Canada are native speakers of Canadian English; some are immigrants who grew up in other English-speaking countries and therefore speak other types of English. In the discussion that follows, Canadian English will be taken to mean the type of English spoken by people who acquired native competence in English while growing up mostly in Canada. (See also French Language; Indigenous Languages of Canada; Languages in Use.)
History
Canadian English owes its very existence to important historical events, especially: the Treaty of Paris of 1763, which ended the Seven Years’ War and opened most of eastern Canada for English-speaking settlement; the American Revolution of 1775–83, which spurred the first large group of English-speakers to move to Canada; and the Industrial Revolution in Britain, which encouraged an even larger group to join them in the 19th century. These and other events determined the patterns of English-speaking settlement in Canada, which in turn influenced the current form of Canadian English.