Ontario Culture & Language

Ontario’s culture is shaped by its landscape painting tradition, its stages and its sheer diversity.

The Group of Seven

A circle of painters working from the 1910s who set out to find a Canadian way of painting the northern landscape — Shield rock, windswept pine, lake and snow — in flat, high-keyed colour influenced by post-impressionism and Scandinavian art. Tom Thomson, who died in Algonquin in 1917 before the group was formally founded, is the presiding figure. The work is central to how Canadians picture their own country, and the McMichael collection north of Toronto is the place to see it.

Theatre

The Stratford Festival and the Shaw Festival are among the largest repertory theatre operations in North America, drawing audiences from across the continent through a long summer season.

Indigenous art

The Woodland School founded by Norval Morrisseau, with its outlined forms and visible spirit lines, is an internationally recognised movement that began here.

Music and film

Toronto’s film festival is one of the most important in the world, and the city has produced a disproportionate share of contemporary popular music.

Comedy

Ontario has an outsized comedy lineage, from the Toronto branch of Second City through the sketch tradition it fed into and the many performers who went on to American film and television. Live comedy remains a normal night out in the city rather than a niche one.

Literature

Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Alice Munro — who set almost all her work in the small towns of southwestern Ontario and won the Nobel Prize in Literature for it in 2013 — all wrote here, and the province sustains a strong publishing industry and one of the largest literary festivals in the world at Harbourfront.

English is the language of daily life across the province and what visitors will use everywhere.

French is an official language of Canada, and federal services — airports, national parks, museums, currency — operate in both. Ontario has a substantial francophone population in the east around Ottawa and in the northeast, with French-language schools, media and services.

Indigenous languages including Ojibwe, Oji-Cree, Cree and Mohawk are spoken in communities across the province and are being actively revitalised.

Everything else: Toronto alone has speakers of more than 160 languages, and neighbourhood signage reflects it.

Canadian English has its own vocabulary — a washroom rather than a bathroom, a toque for a knitted hat, a two-four for a case of beer, and a double-double at a coffee counter.