I have a psychologist friend who came over to my house one day. Like many of my Francophone friends, he has trouble imagining that there can be such a creature as a “Franglophone”—in other words, someone who has the sense of belonging to two different systems and having two different identities. He asked my children, who were a little younger, whether they were Francophone or Anglophone, and my little girl answered saying she was a “bilingualphone”.
It's even worse than “franglophone”.
For my children, it just made no sense to take a position one way or the other.
I have been doing ethnographic research with young immigrants in Montreal, who speak different languages. Asking them to put themselves in one linguistic category or another does not make much sense, as far as they are concerned. They speak three or four languages. So, if you ask them what is the most important language in order to live in Quebec, they will tell you it is French. If you ask them what they need to live in Quebec, they will say they need both languages. In fact, Francophones will tell you the same thing: if they want to live in Montreal and have a good job, they need both languages.
I hear French people from France saying that just because they speak French does not mean it is easy to become integrated in Montreal. It is not language that facilitates integration; it is networks, work, and so on. It is what you do every day that helps you to become integrated into a community—not the language you speak.