Chapter 3. Do birds of a feather play football together? 55 significance. Namely, it is in these circumstances that language can be used most effectively as a signal of ethnic group membership to both members and nonmembers. Communicating with each other in a language which is not the dominant language, strongly separates you and your ethnic peers from those who cannot communicate in that language, precisely because of the fact it is a language used in a context with many individuals who do not master it. As such, it can be understood as functioning as a more radical way of Terkourafi’s (2018) description of differentiating between more and less familiar ways of getting things done linguistically within a single language. As she explains, a key social function of the enactment of familiar linguistic acts is that ‘they provide evidence that the speaker is “one of us” – someone who has been socialized with the same habits and who can therefore be expected to be like us in other respects as well’ (Terkourafi, 2018, p. 7). By doing so, language takes a primary role in creating a sense of belonging. It can be argued that the inclusionary and exclusionary significance in the case of sharing an additional, different language, are even stronger due to the fact it is not so much about familiarity as it is about intelligibility. As such, language serves as a powerful criterion to signify ethnic group membership and ethnic distance between groups. This situation does not apply to all ethnic groups, however, as not all groups master and/or use a second language. Consequently, language primarily creates a boundary between groups who speak and use a specific language, and those who do not speak that specific language or any second language at all. The former are expected to be positioned furthest away from other groups, while the latter are expected to be positioned closer together. Groups, however, will also vary in the degree in which members speak the host country’s language or the language from their country of origin. Of the ethnic backgrounds taken into consideration, individuals with Turkish backgrounds are most likely to speak their own language, closely followed by individuals with a Moroccan background. Minority groups with a background in one of the Dutch ex-colonies (Indonesia, Suriname and the Dutch Antilles) are in turn very likely to use Dutch as their only language (Herweijer, Iedema, Andriessen, & Vervoort, 2016). This would place members with Turkish and Moroccan backgrounds apart from both each other and other groups. Members with ex-colonial backgrounds or a Dutch background are instead grouped together. The concept of inbreeding homophily is normally used in reference to a single ingroup and outgroup. However, the same concept can be easily extended
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