MONTREAL — A couple of months ago, I brought my kids to the annual Halloween party at the local public school. On the way in, I marvelled, as I tend to do, as my elder son connected with his group of friends — a terrific gang of neighbourhood kids whose mother-tongue languages include Wolof, English, Mandarin, French, Japanese, Spanish and Romanian (to name just a few, and in some cases a mix of two or three). I observed as they effortlessly used French to greet each other.

As we entered the gymnasium, the music and commotion got louder. You couldn’t really hear what anyone was saying, or decipher what language anyone was speaking. In the melée, my son took to the makeshift dance floor with his friends, tearing it up in his superhero costume.

I watched as these kids shifted language seamlessly as they sang along to a range of songs, from franco-Québécois artists like Coeur de Pirate and Les Trois Accords, to Alors on danse by Stromae (a French-speaking Belgian hip-hop/electronica artist of Rwandan-Belgian descent), to Party Rock Anthem (in American English) by LMFAO, to the ubiquitous Gangnam Style by the Korean K-pop star Psy.

This anecdote may seem unremarkable. I’d like to argue that it’s actually quite meaningful.

It is one moment (among many) that has helped me to think through how language is actually lived in Montreal, how these things are connected in complex ways to the larger processes of globalization, and why none of this means that Montreal is headed for a future of cultural McDonaldization or some form of perceived U.S.-style anglicization.

Moments like this help us describe how French language, culture and identity are not, in fact, disappearing here, but are instead being reconfigured in ways that reflect our evolving society in Montreal.

I take into consideration that my neighbourhood, Mile End, is sometimes criticized for being its own little microcosm. But I would venture to bet that you could find similar (though not identical) examples in any number of Montreal neighbourhoods including Villeray, Park Extension, St. Henri, Point St. Charles, Côte-St-Luc, N.D.G., Côte-des-Neiges, Outremont and, yes, even Westmount.

How and why did all these kids from different ethno-linguistic and cultural backgrounds end up here together, in this particular school gymnasium operated by the Commission scolaire de Montréal, in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal, at this point in history?

What does it mean that these kids can — and do — draw on their shared knowledge of French to speak with and understand each other, even though they may not speak it everywhere or with everyone all the time?

And finally, what does it mean that all these 6-year-olds in Montreal know the words and dance moves to a pop song from South Korea when, to the best of my knowledge, none of them actually speak Korean?

One simple answer is that people and languages do not stay in one place. They are mobile.

And while people and languages have always moved around the world for various reasons (let’s remember that French and English migration to, and colonization of, North America are why we are having this conversation right now), the astonishing scale, scope and speed with which such movement takes place today, as a result of new communication and transportation technologies, have fundamentally affected our day-to-day lives in many ways. There is something newly significant about how increased globalization has altered the interactions of people both across and within what we have come to understand as immovable, “national” boundaries drawn by men onto maps.