Immigrant Minority Languages at Home and at School: A Case Study of the Netherlands

Language transmission occurs both in the domestic and in the public domain. These domains are typically represented by the home and the school. Viewed from the perspectives of majority-language versus minority-language speakers, language transmission becomes a very different issue. In the case of majoritylanguage speakers, language transmission at home and at school is commonly taken for granted: at home, parents speak this language with their children, and at school, this language is usually the only or the main language spoken and medium of instruction. In the case of minority-language speakers, however, there is usually a mismatch between the language of the home and that of the school. Whether parents in such a context continue to transmit their language to their children is strongly dependent on the degree to which they, and/or the minority group to which they belong, conceive of this language as a core value of their cultural identity. The focus of this article is on the status of immigrant minority (henceforth IM) languages at home and at school in the Dutch context of primary and secondary education. The argument consists of three parts. In the first section, we present empirical data on the distribution and vitality of IM languages at home. In the second section, we discuss the history and status of IM languages at Dutch primary and secondary schools. Against this background, in the third section we present European trends in dealing with multilingualism at school. For an extensive discussion of these issues, see Extra and Ya ¢ gmur 2004.