Language as an agent of integration: the case study of Romanian immigrants in Belgium

ABSTRACT

Among the most important sociocultural phenomena of contemporary global societies, immigration brings significant changes to all areas of immigrants’ life (family, profession, and quality of life), impacting their cultural identities, including identity associated with their language use. As migrants need to be understood in the languages they are proficient in, receive instruction in the destination language, and access essential services understandable to them, language becomes an indispensable agent of migration. In this context, our paper examines the impact of migration on the linguistic behaviour of immigrants, and recognising the pivotal role of language in facilitating the integration of immigrants into host societies. The study focuses on the circumstances Romanian immigrants within Belgium’s multilingual milieu, illustrating the dimensions of the identity crisis they grapple with. Data analysis has shown that migration generates consistent changes regarding the immigrants’ linguistic behaviour, driven, on the one hand, by their desire to be integrated in the host country and, on the other hand, by their attachment to the cultural heritage values of their country of origin.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• cultural identity
• language
• Romanian immigrants
• Belgium

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to our partners from the University of Namur, Belgium: professor Sabine Henry, Catherine Guirkinger and Elisabeth Henriet for their support. We also thank to all the Romanian interviewees settled in Belgium who participated in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Authors are thankful to Romanian Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, within Program 1 – Development of the national RD system, Subprogram 1.2 – Institutional Performance – RDI excellence funding projects, Contract no.[11PFE/30.12.2021], for financial support.

Notes on contributors

Mihaela Mocanu

Mihaela MOCANU is Senior Researcher, Director of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Research of ‘Alexandru Ioan Cuza’ University of Iași. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Philology, a Master’s degree in Comparative literature and Cultural Anthropology and a joint doctoral degree at the Doctoral School of Philosophy and Social and Political Sciences and the Doctoral School of Computer Science, ‘Alexandru Ioan Cuza’ University of Iași. She is a founding member of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Cultural Heritage (IRCCH) research group, which includes researchers from the field of humanities and social sciences and whose main objective is the investigation of the national cultural heritage in the European context, amid globalization and increasing human mobility (https://erris.gov.ro/Interdisciplinary-Research-C-3).

Anca-Diana Bibiri

Anca-Diana Bibiri is Senior Researcher at the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, Institute of Interdisciplinary Research, ‘Alexandru Ioan Cuza’ University of Iași. She has a PhD in Philology (2009), and a postdoctoral fellowship in linguistics from the same University, and her main area of research are: prosody, phonetics and dialectology, computational linguistics, natural language processing, lexicography, sociolinguistics. She has worked in different research projects about prosody and intonation, natural language processing, building Romanian e-corpora, and socio-cultural effects of migration.