Canada is officially bilingual in English and French at the federal level, a status enshrined in the Constitution Act 1982 and the Official Languages Act. French was the dominant language of colonisation from the early 1600s, but British conquest in 1763 shifted political power to English speakers. Québec, where French-speaking Canadians (Québécois) form the majority, retains French as its sole official provincial language and passed the Charter of the French Language (Bill 101) in 1977 to protect it. Canadian English has its own distinctive features — notably the 'Canadian raising' of certain vowel sounds — while Canadian French (Québécois) differs substantially from European French in accent and vocabulary. Indigenous languages, including Cree, Inuktitut, and Ojibwe, are spoken across the country and some hold official status in the territories.
