The Low Countries. Jaargang 12

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Language

The Other Ninety-Six Languages of the Netherlands

For many years now the languages spoken by immigrant minorities in the countries of Europe have been the main concern of Professor Guus Extra of the University of Brabant in Tilburg, the Netherlands, where he is director of Babylon, the Research Centre for Multilingualism. Extra and the Babylon team have now published a substantial academic monograph on the use of those other languages at home and in school in the Netherlands. Their new book contains a wide range of empirical data, clearly presented in tables, lists and graphs, with many interesting details and a thorough, fifty-page bibliography.

The book presents the findings of a nation-wide survey of the immigrant languages spoken by pupils in the Dutch school system. Of the 140,000 students interviewed, thirty percent turn out to be speaking a language other than Dutch at home. The total number of languages that has been recorded is 96, ranging from Akan and Albanian to Swedish and Zulu. There are profiles here of the 23 most frequently reported home languages. In order of decreasing numbers, these are: Turkish, Arabic, Berber, English, Hindi, Papiamentu, French, German, Sranan Tongo, Spanish, Chinese, Kurdish, Somali, Italian, Moluccan Malay, Urdu, Portuguese, Serbo-Croat, Javanese, Farsi, Vietnamese, Greek and Dari/Pashto. The first twelve of these have all been reported at least 1,000 times.

The profiles present information about language proficiency, language choice, language dominance and language preference of the young speakers of these languages, from the age of four until they are 16 or 17. One thing we learn, for example, is that Berber children from Morocco acquire good speaking and listening proficiency in their own language as they grow up; that they mostly use this language with their parents; that they generally do not learn to write and read Berber well; and that from the moment they go to primary school the Dutch language becomes dominant and becomes their preferred language. A relevant factor here is, no doubt, that there is no provision for Berber in the Dutch education system. The same goes for Hindi, Papiamentu, Sranan Tongo and Kurdish, even though these languages are all amongst the top twelve listed above.

Using these profiles, the Babylon team has drawn a number of interesting cross-linguistic comparisons. Mother-tongue proficiency (at least orally) is highest among speakers of Turkish, Berber, Greek and Chinese. For these minorities, Dutch is a language predominantly used with one's friends rather than with one's parents. Conversely, when native speakers of English, German, Hindi and Sranan Tongo are speaking to their parents, they use Dutch far more often than their own language. In contrast, meanwhile, more than half of all Farsi- and Dari/ Pashto-speakers always prefer to speak their own language. Turkish and Urdu also closely follow this preference pattern. For languages like Moluccan Malay, Hindi and Sranan Tongo, on the other hand, no more than one in three speakers shows such a preference, whereas amongst speakers of German and Javanese this preference is found in only one in five speakers.

With these detailed profiles and comparisons the Babylon team is at the forefront of developments in

Chinese New Year's celebration with dancing dragons and fireworks on Amsterdam's New Market.

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the field internationally. For the 52 languages of New York, for example, García and Fishman in The Multilingual Apple (1997) have many more socio-statistical data at their disposal (thanks to the language questions in the American census), but they only give profiles of eleven of the immigrant communities concerned. And although these make for fascinating reading, they do not offer the kind of information on language choice, proficiency and dominance that we find in the Babylon book. For London, Baker and Eversley in their Multilingual Capital (2000) have found many more languages (no less than three hundred) in the London school system, spoken by some 850,000 school pupils - but they have not yet developed any in-depth profiles of speakers or communities.

What comes out very clearly in the Babylon book is how common and widespread multilingualism is in the Netherlands today. Extra and his team here map out the contemporary social and educational context, where Dutch currently functions as the lingua franca between speakers of many very different linguistic backgrounds. The Netherlands today is an immigration country, where the influx of speakers of other languages can be expected to continue for years to come. So, teaching Dutch as a second language is of obvious importance for the future of Dutch society and culture.

At the same time the Babylon team advocates the introduction of trilingual education as early as possible for all school pupils in the Netherlands. This approach, which has been tried out in Frisian primary schools from 1997 on, may offer stimulating opportunities for the initial intellectual development of minority children. The Babylon team also advocates working with language portfolios, which can turn the linguistic riches of the multicultural classroom into opportunities for teaching and learning, rather than treating them as a handicap and an obstacle.

In this respect, the Babylon-team takes quite a different, and rather more European, position than the present Dutch government, which sees the fact that immigrants speak other languages as the source of their lack of educational success. With nationalism resurgent in the post-Fortuyn era, the government has now adopted a ‘Dutch only’ policy and decided to stop all teaching of immigrant minority languages as of 1 August 2004. Whether this return to the exclusive Dutch monolingualism of the past will work in the entirely different social conditions that obtain today remains to be seen.

Reinier Salverda

Guus Extra, Rian Aarts, Tim van der Avoird, Peter Broeder & Kutlay Yagmur (eds.) De andere talen van Nederland. Thuis en op school. Bussum: Coutinho, 2003. 377 pp. isbn 90-6283-275-x. See also: Salverda, Reinier ‘The Other Languages of the Netherlands.’ In: The Low Countries 8 (2000), pp. 245-252.