This study examines how language is employed by a diverse group of secondary school students in Venlo, the Netherlands, to create, negotiate, reproduce, and maintain social and ethnic boundaries through the use of category... [ view full abstract ]
This study examines how language is employed by a diverse group of secondary school students in Venlo, the Netherlands, to create, negotiate, reproduce, and maintain social and ethnic boundaries through the use of category labels. The analysis is based on five months of ethnographic fieldwork (field-notes and audio-recordings) with thirty pupils of the vocational track of one school. All pupils were born in the Netherlands and all carried Dutch nationality; almost half of them were children of immigrants, mostly from Turkey and Morocco. This latter group of pupils engaged in constant identification of themselves and others using ethnic labels, most prominently categorizing (other) people as Dutchmen (in three versions: ‘Nederlanders’, ‘Hollanders’ and ‘tattas’), and themselves as Turks (‘Turken’), Moroccans (‘Marokkanen’), or foreigners (‘buitenlanders’). The categorization scheme used by the pupils reflects social boundaries that are pervasive on a national scale in the Netherlands, where the public and political debate surrounding immigration and integration has been polarizing social groups.
In this presentation I discuss how the pupils’ categories relate to that debate, but focusing especially on how they are endowed with locally specific meanings that diverge from larger scale contexts. Although the pupils identified as, for example, Moroccans, they also expressly dis-identified with Moroccans in Morocco. The category ‘Marokkaan’ thus denoted a category endogenous to the Netherlands when used by these pupils. When used by the out-group (for example teachers), however, the same label was often used for othering and constructed unbelonging to the Netherlands. I use Membership Categorization Analysis (Sacks 1992) in combination with a constructivist approach to identification through language (Bucholtz & Hall 2004) to discuss how the notion of ethnicity, its meanings, and relevance, are constructed in interaction. The pupils’ discourse shows a constant tension between essentialist understandings of their ethnic identity and, simultaneously, a striking fluidity and important nuances as to what it means to be a member of an ethnic category.
References
Bucholtz, Mary & Hall, Kira (2004). Language and Identity. In Alessandro Duranti (ed.), A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, 369–94. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Sacks, Harvey (1992). Lectures on Conversation, G Jefferson (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
