On the Ethnolinguistic Identity of Flemish High School Students in Brussels

Abstract

The attitudes of Flemish high school students in Brussels towards different types of Brussels Flemings were registered in five different experimental conditions. The latter were created by varying systematically the following characteristics of the investigator: whether he belonged to the Flemish ingroup or to the Francophone outgroup, whether he was an insider or an outsider in Brussels, and whether he converged linguistically towards his audience or diverged from it. The purpose of this experiment was to examine the ethnic identity of the Ss and to evaluate Tajfel's and Giles's concept of it. It is argued that what their theory calls a positive sense of identity, in the present case, would be much better termed a defence mechanism serving to hide uneasiness and frustration and thereby protecting an uncertain and vulnerable self. Three points are made to show that the Ss' strong positive identification with the ‘consistent’ Brussels Flemings and their equally strong differentiation from the ‘gallicised’ ones cannot be considered as indicators of a positive sense of identity.

The Way They Speak: A Social Psychological Perspective on the Stigma of Nonnative Accents in Communication

“…The broader sociocultural context of the society in which the listener and the speaker communicate may affect the interaction (Côté & Clément, 1994;Dailey, Giles, & Jansma, 2005;MacIntyre et al, 1998). Such context encompasses general attitudes toward immigrants in a given country and reflects attitudes toward an out-group that speaks a different language in the context of a country where two or more languages are spoken, such as in Canada (Côté & Clément, 1994;Taylor & Simard, 1975), Belgium (Deprez & Persoons, 1984), or Spain (Ros, Cano, & Huici, 1987). In times of greater anxiety over immigration or tensions between linguistic out-groups, an accented individual may be particu larly aware of the stigma associated with his or her group membership and the accent that betrays this affiliation (Lippi-Green, 1997).…”

Intergroup fairness and bias in children

“…At the attitudinal level, it is expected that social identity processes which enable an individual to measurably increment his or her own self-esteem by aggrandizing one's own group, and derogating outgroups would produce more unfavourable attitudes towards the outgroup members of different-than same-language groups, particularly when members of one's own socializing community already tend to derogate members of the other language group at an overall societal level (Nuttin, 1976;Deprez and Persoons, 1985). Further, one would expect that attitudes towards the different, but not same, language outgroups would become more negative with increases in age level (Aboud and Skerry, 1984;Milner, 1984).…”