University of Ottawa (uOttawa)

The University of Ottawa is the largest bilingual (English-French) university in the world. Located at the heart of Canada’s capital, we have ready access to the great institutions of our country. Our advances in social sciences, health, science and the humanities make uOttawa a unique place to learn, grow and excel.

Foundations and Values

A competitive advantage

The success of our university as a unique and internationally recognized institution is in part due to our bilingual nature and the special role we play within French-speaking communities in Ontario, across Canada and around the world.

Our campus lives, learns and plays in both languages. No other major Canadian university can say the same. This duality makes our students uniquely prepared to shape our country’s future and foster its values.

Furthermore, Francophonie holds a prominent place amongst our research and our academic programs. We maintain special ties to Francophone communities in order to promote and strengthen both the French language and Francophone culture at the national and international levels. To build on this foundation while strengthening our ties with Francophone communities, our strategic plan Transformation 2030 shows our commitment to

• recruit more Francophone students to improve the linguistic balance within our student population
• encourage further research on Francophonie
• pool our strengths and increase the visibility of Francophonie on campus
• endow new chairs and highlight research and publication in French
• increase opportunities to study in French and enhance cultural, social and scientific French-language environments on campus

In addition, to fully highlight our extraordinary advantage as the world’s largest bilingual (French-English) university, we will

• facilitate the acquisition of a second official language
• increase enrolment in our French immersion stream to 3,500, which is 10% of our current undergraduate population
• design an innovative program to help Francophones learn English
• annotate diplomas to reflect the graduate’s level of bilingualism
• promote research in second-language acquisition, development and evaluation, and create graduate programs for this purpose

We have set ourselves ambitious goals for the years ahead. We aim to make the University of Ottawa one of the great universities of our time, with a reputation to match its achievements.