In April 2024, I started a research internship at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), joining Assistant Professor in German Sociolinguistics, Dr Naomi Truan, in her project to map the German-speaking community in the Netherlands. I am in my second year of my Bachelor’s in Political Science at Leiden University in The Hague. The research internship was part of the elective space of my Honours Track.

Why investigate German in the Netherlands?

Before I start writing about what I learned as a research assistant on this project, I need to give you a bit of background information.

German holds a prominent place in Europe as the most spoken first language and the third most spoken second language in the EU (European Commission, 2024). This includes both first speakers of German or so-called ‘native speakers’ and those who learnt German as a second, third, etc. language. The linguistic prominence of German extends far beyond geopolitical borders, shaping the experiences of German speakers living in places where German is not the dominant language.

This project led by Dr Naomi Truan explores the experiences of German speakers in the Netherlands from a sociolinguistic perspective. Together with students in German Studies, the aim is to understand how German speakers navigate their multilingual lives and participate in Dutch society. By examining their linguistic practices and personal narratives, the project aims to gain deeper insights into the complex relationship between language and identity in a multicultural context.

In this first blog post I reflect on the beginning of my internship as part of this project and some of the challenges we came across during this first phase.

Start of the project: data collection challenges

So far, it has been difficult finding comprehensive data on the German-speaking community in the Netherlands. To our knowledge, there has been no previous attempt by researchers to map the German-speaking population of the Netherlands. This is surprising, given that there has been a large public and academic interest in other minority languages spoken in the Netherlands (Extra, G., & Yağmur, K., 2008; Edwards, 2016; KNAW, 2018). There are several reasons as to why this is the case. One reason has to do with the focus on German so-called ‘native speakers’, often reduced to Germans from Germany. This leads to the erasure of both first speakers of German from other German-speaking countries such as Austria, Switzerland, Luxemburg, and Belgium and of second language speakers (Truan, 2024).

Even if we were to focus on nationals for the German-speaking community, we would have to include at least six different countries where German is an official language (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg and Lichtenstein), with many of them also having other official and regional languages. While municipalities and the national government publish records on immigrants’ countries of origin, they do not track the languages these immigrants use. Therefore, using nationality as a proxy for language use is insufficient. Similarly, being German or Austrian does not necessarily mean an individual regularly uses German, especially in a migration context. Factors such as work environment, family situation, and home language significantly influence language use.

Additionally, many individuals who learned German as a second language actively use it in the Netherlands. For example, migrant workers from Eastern Europe often learned German in school or lived in Germany before coming to the Netherlands (Hovens, 2020). This also includes the 61% of Dutch respondents that indicated their German proficiency in the Eurobarometer survey (European Commission, 2024). This is relevant, as the project is not limited to first speakers of German but also includes those who use German as a lingua franca or have done so prior to migrating to the Netherlands. This additional layer of complexity makes finding reliable data challenging.

Getting to know the German community in the Netherlands

To address these gaps, we are currently reaching out to various German-speaking organisations in Leiden, The Hague, and across the Netherlands. Through their assistance, we hope to gather data that will help us map out the use of German in the Netherlands more accurately. The students of the course will also conduct interviews with members of the German-speaking community to understand their origins, backgrounds, language practices, and experiences in the Netherlands. Rich, qualitative interview data will help illuminate the diversity within the community by including individuals with various origins and reasons for speaking German.

Stay tuned for my next blog post on what we found out about German as a minority language in a Dutch context!

References

Edwards, A. (2016). English in the Netherlands: Functions, forms, and attitudes. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

European Commission. (2024). Europeans and their languages: Netherlands. Retrieved from: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2979  

Extra, G., & Yağmur, K. (2008). Immigrant minority languages in Europe: Cross-national and cross-linguistic perspectives. In Multilingual Europe, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 315–336. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110208351.4.315

Hovens, D. (2020). Language policy and linguistic landscaping in a contemporary blue-collar workplace in the Dutch-German borderland. Language Policy, 20(1), 645-666. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-020-09572-y.

Truan, N. (2024). Whose language counts? Native speakerism and monolingual bias in language ideological research: Challenges and directions for further research. European Journal of Applied Linguistics, 12(1), 34–53. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/eujal-2024-0006.