Determinants of emotional language use preferences of ethnolinguistic minority children in Antwerp, Belgium

ABSTRACT

Within multilingual families, the emotionality of languages can impact individual and family wellbeing. But few studies have investigated the influence of the familial linguistic context in shaping emotional language use preferences. Guided by the Family Language Policy framework, we consider how the language use and the language attitudes of parents, siblings and children themselves affect the emotional language use preferences of children, independent of children's proficiencies in their heritage (HL) and institutional (IL) languages. We analyze unique data from over 500 primary school children (aged 10–12) from Moroccan, Turkish, Eastern-European and mixed descent living in Antwerp, the largest Dutch-speaking city of Belgium. We find that children's emotional preferesnces are strongly affected by their proficiency in the heritage language but not their proficiency in Dutch, by their parents’ and siblings’ language practices but not their own practice and by children's attitudes about the relative importance of HL and IL. Overall, the results suggest that emotional language preferences of children reflect children's own acculturation process as well as that of their families.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• emotional language
• family language policy
• language practices
• language attitudes
• language proficiency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This was a general question to differentiate between children from monolingual Dutch-speaking families and children from families wherein at least one non-Dutch language was spoken. In follow-up questions, children who indicated that they spoke at least one non-Dutch language at home, were asked to report which language(s) this/these was/were and which of these non-Dutch languages was spoken the most at home (further regarded as the HL). In a next set of questions, children were asked which language (Dutch or non-Dutch) they mostly used to talk to parents and siblings and vice versa.

2 Although Dutch proficiency was also based on self-reports, and is thus also subjective to possible self-bias, research shows moderate correlations between objective tests and youths’ self-evaluations of proficiency in their first and second languages (Edele et al. 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Graziela Dekeyser

Graziela Dekeyser is currently working as a doctoral researcher and teaching assistant at KU Leuven. Her main research interests include aspects of multilingualism among children (e.g. emotional language use, language practices and proficiencies, etc.), identity construction of children and adolescents as well as broader family sociological themes. She coordinates the Multilingualism in Antwerp project and is the Flemish coordinator of the Louvain Adolescents Survey.

Orhan Agirdag

Orhan Agirdag (PhD) is an assistant professor at KU Leuven and the University of Amsterdam. Formerly, he was a Fulbright Fellow at the UCLA. His main research interests include inequalities in education, teacher education, multilingualism and religiosity. Currently, Orhan Agirdag holds the chair of scientific research at the Netherlands Initiative for Education Research (NRO) and he is a member of the Flemish Young Academy.