Timeline of official languages policy in Canada

Because the country contains two major language groups and numerous other linguistic minorities, in Canada official languages policy has always been an important and high-profile area of public policy.

In an exhaustive 1971 study of Canadian language law prepared for the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, Claude-Armand Sheppard offered this definition for the term “official language”: “[An] official language is a language in which all or some of the public affairs of a particular definition are, or can be, conducted, either by law or custom. We take public affairs to comprise the parliamentary and legislative process, administrative regulations, the rendering of justice, all quasi-judicial activities, and the overall day-to-day administration.”

This article lists key events in the evolution of language policy in Canada since 1710, when the French-speaking population of Acadia first came under British administration. The timeline covers the policies of the colonial predecessors to the current Canadian state, and the policies of Canada's provinces and territories. The policies listed include:

These policy changes have been important to the extent that they affected the lives of individual Canadians. Therefore, in order to give some idea of the relative importance of various policies over the centuries, population statistics for Canada’s different language groups are included where such information is available.

Official languages policies, in one form or another, have been in existence since the beginning of the European colonization of North America. In the early years, French was the sole language used in France's North American colonial possessions, English had been the sole language of Britain's colonies in the New World. The First Nations continued to use their indigenous languages in their own affairs. There were a limited number of people who knew both a European and a native North American language, often Christian missionaries the “black robes” and the children of natives they ministered to. These bilinguals were called on in diplomacy, but otherwise the linguistic worlds of the settlers and the natives were largely separate. Without being fluent, natives and settlers often learned very rudimentary forms of each other’s languages called “pidgins”. Pidgins, such as the Algonquian–Basque pidgin, Labrador Inuit Pidgin French, American Indian Pidgin English, and Pidgin Delaware were initially important languages of trade and diplomacy, but none of them was ever prestigious enough to be used in any other governmental context.

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