54 Ethnic sorting in football immigrant), as well as the problematic domain of ‘culture’” (pp. 1335). Barth (1969), however, stresses that ethnic classifications do revolve around ‘cultural stuff’ but are created and maintained through an ongoing process of identification and ascription by members and non-members. This involves what he describes as ‘boundary maintenance’, which is the continuous social practice through which both members and non-members use certain characteristics to signify ethnic in- and outgroups. Following this line of reasoning, ethnic difference and similarity is communicated through certain salient social characteristics, which act as stronger or lesser boundaries between groups. According to Brubaker (2013), two social markers have been particularly influential in this regard: religion and language. Given the data at hand, I will limit myself here to these two. Below, I will discuss how both these boundaries could play a role in driving ethnic groups closer together or further apart, and consequently are related to inbreeding. However, before I move on to this discussion, I do want to stress here that I do not wish to imply that religion and language are the only boundaries between ethnic groups, nor does it mean that they are the most important in any situation or at any given time. Language When considering use of language and religion for ethnic classifications of difference, we should not regard it as a ‘continuous spectrum of variation’, but instead, as ‘categorically differentiated’, which means that ‘in popular understandings’ they ‘sort people into distinct, bounded and largely selfreproducing ‘communities’ (Brubaker, 2013, p. 3). Consequently, even though indices for linguistic distance that express the degree of similarity or difference between languages exist, there is little reason to believe individuals consciously take such measures into account, or that they provide a realistic reflection of their boundary management practices in daily life. In order to conceptualize the role of language as an interethnic boundary, we must consider how language could come into play when making ethnic classifications of difference. A crucial distinction to make in this case would be the differentiation between people who speak a specific language and people who do not. More specifically, in a post-migration context where most people with migrant backgrounds - particularly those of the second generation - will often be able to speak the language of the host country, speaking and/or using another language in addition to the host country language will be of particular
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