Does Language Say It All? Immigrants' Lanquage Use as Predictor of Sustainable Integration into Dutch Society

Across the European Union, scepticism toward immigration is growing. These anti-immigration sentiments are often rooted in a concern about immigrants’ lack of integration. This study investigated how immigrants’ language use, specifically the way in which they balance the receiving countries’ language and country-of-origin language, related to their sense of belonging to Dutch society and, by extent, their sustainable integration into that society. Furthermore, this project investigated how immigrants’ country of origin influenced the relation between Dutch language us and sense of belonging to Dutch society. To this aim data was used from the New Immigrant Survey Netherlands (NIS2NL), a four-wave panel study among new immigrants to the Netherlands between 2013 and 2018. In line with previous findings, a significant positive association between Dutch language use and increased sense of belonging was found. Moreover, it was found that Dutch language use had the same effect on sense of belonging regardless of the country of origin of immigrants. Country of origin, however, did have a significant effect on sense of belonging by itself: immigrants from Bulgaria and Poland reported a higher sense of belonging to the Netherlands than immigrants from Spain and Turkey. With regards to current language use and sense of belonging, it was found that immigrants who only used the country-of-origin language reported the lowest sense of belonging. Interestingly, there were no significant differences in sense of belonging between immigrants using only Dutch and immigrants using both Dutch and the country-of-origin language. First, these results confirm that integration policy should focus on encouraging immigrants to use the language of the receiving country, not only on their language competency. Second, these results indicate that the integration of immigrants is not harmed by speaking their country-of-origin language if they also use the receiving countries’ language. Currently, immigrants are often discouraged to use their own language because the idea prevails that this impairs their integration into the host society. To counteract this, the public should be made aware of the fact that no negative effect of the use of their country-of-origin language on immigrants’ sense of belonging was found. The results of this study suggest that making the public aware of this fact, and developing policy focused on language use, are important steps toward becoming a fully integrated society without social boundaries between insiders and outsiders.