Fast-forward three decades, and separatism is largely in retreat. One in four Anglophones in Quebec marry French Quebecers.

I live on Plateau-Mont-Royal, a predominantly Francophone neighborhood in the east of Montreal. Twentysomething Francophone shopkeepers answer me in fluent English when I address them in French, and residents of all linguistic persuasions seem more obsessed by their search for the perfect latte than whether you order it in the language of Shakespeare or Molière.

Recent census figures show that 45 percent of people in Quebec speak both French and English.

Xavier Dolan, 28, one of Quebec’s — and Canada’s — most celebrated film directors, recalled that when his parents lived in the predominantly Anglophone neighborhood of NDG in the 1980s, his mother couldn’t wait to leave because she was taunted by Anglophones telling her to “speak white,” a slur used to denigrate those speaking other languages in public.

Today’s younger generation, he said, had discarded the hang-ups of their parents.

“There is a shift in the younger generation,” he said. “In my case, English meant Hollywood, it was film, it was ‘Titanic,’ so I wanted to speak English as quickly as I could.”

Brian Myles, the editor of Le Devoir, the influential left-leaning Quebecois daily, argued that the “two solitudes” were a thing of the past.

“Today the French speak English and the English speak French, and that didn’t exist when you had the two solitudes,” he said.