Multiple languages, multiple identities? Children's language characteristics and their ethnic and national identification

ABSTRACT

An increasing number of ethnolinguistic minority children in European cities grow up multilingual, being proficient in more than one language. Current public and political debates often insinuate that these children's language behaviour is a reflection of their identification with and integration in society. Though some empirical studies have corroborated this idea, others have contested it, suggesting that a more detailed analysis of the identity-language link is advisable. This quantitative study investigates if and how language practices, language exposure and language proficiencies differentially shape identification with the majority group and the ethnolinguistic minority group among a sample of primary school children (N = 528; ages 10–12) living in Antwerp, Belgium. Our results suggest that identification with these two groups involves separate processes and as such, this study helps to nuance the polarised public and political debate in Belgium about the role of language as an indicator of integration. In addition, the findings suggest that the essentializing of language within formal institutions such as schools, may contribute to the large share of children reporting that they strongly identify with the ethnolinguistic minority group as compared to the number of children strongly identifying with Belgium.

KEYWORDS:

• Identification
• children
• multilingualism
• language practice
• language exposure
• language proficiency

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Calvin Gray Swicegood for his ever insightful comments and his help with the manuscript preparation and Koen Matthijs for his continued support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The exposure to the HL by siblings and exposure to Dutch by siblings do not necessarily mirror each other. Children were asked to indicate which language they predominantly used when talking with their younger versus older siblings (if present). Therefore, the two variables could differ according to the parity of the sibling(s). Single children got the code 0.