Scientific justification of social policies: concepts of language and immigrant integration

Abstract

ABSTRACTPopulation mobility, globalisation, and the Internet contribute to the change of immigration patterns and the emergence of new kinds of identities and integration strategies. It is necessary to re-examine the heuristic significance of this field's key concepts in order to ensure that relevant and theoretically sound knowledge consistently informs integration policies, measures, and programmes. This paper focuses on the concepts of language and maintains that a narrow-utilitarian approach to the issue of language and integration may thrive due to uncritical acceptance of an instrumentalist view on language as a means of communication and/or a social marker together with an essentialist concept of identity that stems from the sociolinguistic tradition. However, this conceptual framework does not correspond to the complexity of the integration process in a contemporary society. The present paper aims to contribute to the field of language and immigrant integration via outlining an alternative approach to language grounded in the ideas of Humboldt, Potebnja, and Vygotsky (language as a creative force, a worldview, and a mediating tool) and discussing its potential for addressing the issue of integration in contemporary conditions.