Taalattitude, Taalvaardigheid, en Sociale Omstandigheden Van Marokkaanse Arbeiders in Nederland

Abstract

The present pilot-study was undertaken under the assumption that the acquisition of Dutch by migrant workers is governed by a complex set of social and individual factors including: - degree and kind of contact with Dutch people; - internalized norms governing the level of Dutch that migrants of different nationalities should reach; - individual integrative motivations. To determine which factors affect acquisition most, 20 Moroccans in Amsterdam, all of whom had been there for at least two years, were in-terviewed in depth. Topics discussed in the interview included facets of their life in the Netherlands, their work situation, contacts with other Moroccans and with Dutch people, motivation to learn Dutch, preceived threats to ethnic and religious identity, experience of discrimination, etc. A number of measures were calculated on the basis of the interview: - syntactic index (based on MLU, agreement, article use, copula deletion); - rating index (based on judgements of the Moroccans' taped speech by 48 subjects); - social index (based on age, education, civil state, contacts, occupation, living situation, etc.); - attitude index (including instrumental and integrative motivation, ethnic identity, sense of isolation); - self-rating index (based on the informants' rating of their own linguistic level in comparison with taped voices The following correlations were found between these measures: rating social attitude self-rating syntactic .82 .74 .64 .08 social .59 Further analysis of the informants' reactions to taped voices re-vealed: (a) a large gap between passive and active knowledge of Dutch; (b) stereotypes relating to a rather rigid stratification of ethnic groups in terms of their level in Dutch. Further research will have to reveal to what extent these stereotypes are normative for acquisition behavior.