Canadians

Canadiens (French: Canadiens/Canadiennes) are the citizens or otherwise people identified with the North American country of Canada, officially the Canadian Republic (République canadienne). This identity may be residential, legal, historical and/or cultural; for most Canadians, many (or all) of these identity factors exist and are collectively the source of their being "Canadian".

As Canada is and has been a multicultural country since its establishment, ethnicity and by extension language (especially mother tongue) and religion (or lack thereof) are not generally factors determining one's being Canadian; indeed, while just under a quarter of Canadians identify as "white" (originating or descending from European or Middle Eastern peoples), and about half of Canadians speak English as their first or primary language and just over a quarter French, the remaining almost one-quarter of Canadians are roughly half accounted for by bilingual English and French speakers and half by speakers of a multitude of other minority languages, the five most-spoken of which are Chinese varieties (primarily Cantonese and Mandarin), Punjabi, Tagalog, Spanish and Arabic.

Canada's relatively small indigenous population of nearly five million people nevertheless use over 200 languages in 12 distinct language families, although most Indigenous Canadians speak primarily or exclusively English and/or French, with only an estimated 10% of the indigenous population using their indigenous language at home and/or in their indigenous community, with many of these languages highly vulnerable and some already extinct, although in recent years there have been growing efforts to revive and/or increase the utility and use of indigenous languages, championed by nonprofit groups receiving federal funding as part of the country's Truth and Reconciliation Movement.