One of the little known aspects of the history of “la francophonie” in Western Canada is its inherent complexity, due largely to the fact that it is based on three distinct sources: first, the Mitchifs, descendants of the early “coureurs des bois”, followed nearly a century later by colonists coming either directly from Lower
Canada or from the American states where the French-Canadians had already settled (the New England states and the Midwest), and third, the relatively important presence, in a number of rural communities, of colonists from France, Belgium and Switzerland. These French-speaking colonists began arriving in the West from the 1880s on and continued doing so until the 1930s. These immigrants were mostly farmers, stockbreeders or blue collar workers and they founded a number of communities where they constituted an important majority or they settled in already established French-speaking villages in sufficient numbers to exert a noticeable and durable influence on the local vernacular speech. In this study, we briefly review the history of a number of these communities and describe the few linguistic descriptions that have been made of this unique phenomenon in Canada.