<p>The post by glendalais89 is an excellent one, but let me add another perspective, one from outside Quebec. I’ve been traveling frequently to Montreal since the early 1970s and today I find tension over language to have largely abated. In short, the French language laws did what they were designed to do, although many Anglophones resented them, and the survival of French as the primary language of Quebec is no longer in question. </p>
<p>My French is quite limited, my wife is completely bilingual and my son, who just graduated from McGill, falls in the middle. In our own ways, each of us is completely comfortable getting around in all the neighborhoods in Montreal. The only time language became even a small problem for my son was when he played summer-league baseball and traveled to many smaller towns in Quebec.</p>
<p>However while McGill is an English-language institute, my son says that socially he did find it divided by language. The Francophone students tended to hang out together, as did the English speakers from Ontario. In his experience, Canadians from the western provinces and U.S. students didn’t fall into either of those large blocs and so tended to socialize with each other. Generalizations, I know, but that was his overall impression of how language shaped his time in McGill and Montreal.</p>