Language and belonging

Read this alongside my shorter post, “Language and identity.”

I love that internet anecdote about the two guys on a bus or in a grocery store, or in some public space, chatting to each other in a language indigenous to pre-European North America. Some asshole turns to them and tells them that if they want to live in the US, they should speak English. They royally own him by pointing out (in English, obviously) that English itself is an immigrant language (in contrast to what they're speaking) and he should get back in his lane. Or something. It’s an internet anecdote, and it does the rounds every once in a while. I think I first saw it on Twitter, years ago, when Twitter was still Twitter. People in the circles I belong to tend to pass it around because, I guess, we like seeing racists and xenophobes getting owned. Or because there’s something truly unpleasant about other people in public space feeling that they should be allowed to enforce their norms on you, full stop, not just in how you engage with them. It’s probably a combination of the two. The smug censoriousness of the good ol’ ‘merican man who wants the people he perceives as immigrants to shape up and join his society, followed by the brilliant punchline and vicarious pleasure of first peoples getting their own back, a dynamic that doesn’t get to happen often enough. We, the enlightened leftists, experience our own little moment of smugness when we read stories like this.

Language is a battleground. We know this. Language is an important part of identity. Colonial governments wouldn’t deliberately kill indigenous languages if language weren’t an important means of control. That jerk in the line or on the bus or wherever he was, wouldn’t behave like such a tool if language wasn’t a way of enforcing sameness and controlling the ability of others to be other. But this essay isn’t really about that man, and it isn’t even particularly about the use of English in an English-dominant country like the United States.

Plotting a continuum

So let’s find some positions on the continuum of language, its use and its enforcement. Language is about control, identity, power, and belonging. Our angry man cares about the use of English in public spaces because he believes that people he perceives as other should try harder to integrate into what he sees as the shared way of life of his country. By wanting others to speak English at all times, he is enforcing his vision of what the country he lives in should sound like, and what should count as a valid form of communication. He also gets the side-benefit of eavesdropping on them, to make sure they stay in line.

The second point on our continuum: an ocean away from the angry man shouting at people who were there first, I am a foreigner living in a country to which I have no historical family ties. I moved here for work. If I were poor, had arrived through an irregular immigration pathway, wasn’t Anglophone, or wasn’t white, people might call me an economic migrant. Instead, though I absolutely moved here for financial reasons (working conditions and wages in Dutch higher education are much better than in England, where I was living before), I get to be a knowledge migrant. But in fact, for nearly three years already, I have been something else: I am integrated. I have an indefinite right to stay. I have ceased to be a knowledge migrant and have become someone with a different confusing kind of ID card. I have been granted this stability by working my way through an official pathway to integration. I am not a citizen, and may never be, but I am officially integrated into Dutch society.

Being integrated

What does it mean to be integrated? For one thing, the requirements for integration are highly-politicized. There’s always some damn party running on the platform of making integration requirements stiffer. In 2021, a law was passed here to alter requirements for integration. While on the one hand, it introduced more personalized pathways to integration (and continued the devolution of many public-facing government services to municipalities, but I digress), on the other, it increased the language requirements for many people who are either required to integrate in order to stay, or who want to integrate in order to have more security. I integrated under the old rules. The law had been passed, but it hadn’t been implemented yet. At the time, I remember other foreigners I knew who were trying to integrate before the implementation of stricter language rules. When I integrated, under the old rules, I had to pass five exams, and was exempted from a sixth one because I was employed. While one of my mandatory exams was about Dutch society, the other four were all language tests. I had to demonstrate an A2 capacity in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. In CEFR, A is low and C is high, one is low and two is high. So A2 is a fairly modest level of language competence, but still takes some time to achieve. That new law I mentioned was, in part, aimed at increasing the language requirements for those wishing to integrate.

Language is part of being seen as integrated in a society. Language is a way of demonstrating belonging. Language can be a means of restricting entry, or enforcing a certain kind of participation. In the Dutch case, the move from an A2 requirement to B1 is not only a statement of what is required in order to stay in this country, it is an indicator to the population as a whole that a certain level and kind of participation is needed in order to be accepted. You must be this tall to ride the roller coaster. Or, in this case, you must be this Dutch to stay. It’s not just the Netherlands. In the UK, there has been much discussion in the last few years about the need for stricter English requirements. Whether centre-left or far right, parties of all stripes are leaning heavily into a narrative about worthy and useful immigration. Whether it’s the popular Zeitgeist, increased mobility, or garden variety fear of the other, we no longer seem quite so interested in the kind of cultural pluralism that, I at least, was raised to appreciate. The cultural mosaic that my passport country, Canada, sells as its approach to integration is a far cry from the increasingly prevalent fears that if people are allowed to watch their own TV channels, go to their own churches, and hang out with others from their own original countries, they might become terrorists or at least never learn how to make stamppot correctly. Many countries have, of course, been at this for a very long time, and there’s always the balancing act between core national values and the values feared in newcomers. This could be about the right or not to wear religious symbols in France, an officially secular country, or the right to see yourself as Italian-American, as long as your Italianness doesn’t get in the way of your Americanness. But what do these other markers of integration have to do with language?

Push-belonging

Language is exclusion, language is belonging. Language is control, and language is expression. The imposition of external requirements on language learning and language proficiency as a mode of deciding whether someone gets to stay or not, gain residency or not, receive asylum or not, be secure or not, continue to invest their time, emotion, and effort in a country or not, all are using language as a punishment, not an incentive. It forces people to jump through hoops, whatever the size of the hoops and whatever their number, as a means of proving their commitment to being in a country. When you make it a requirement with an ever-higher standard, you make language a negative or compulsory feature of integration. You’re saying “We don’t want you unless you can achieve this standard.”

No one ever forced me to integrate. As a very privileged foreigner in this country, I could have gotten my employer to apply for a new work permit for me every five years, ad infinitum. I could have been a contented expat, never needing to answer a single question about geography, health cards, or any of the others aspects of the knowledge of Dutch society exam. There are days when I feel angry and disillusioned by my adopted country. But on the days I don’t, I tend to want to become a better Dutch speaker. The reason I want to improve my Dutch is because I want to feel more included, more belonging, more choice, more options. For me, in my own role and profession, it might be nice to have a bigger public profile one day. I can’t be a talking head on the news with my current Dutch-level, even if I’m an expert on the topic of discussion. I won’t be invited onto a current affairs program any time soon. In short, I’m aware that there is a limit to what I can do in society and in work with the language level I currently possess. I am incentivized to improve my Dutch not because I’m required to do so, or because anyone ever forced me to do that, but because I want my native-Dutch-speaking friends to stop laughing at me for the way I pronounce certain words (I'm looking at you, diphthong in the "ui" sound).

When we use language as a condition of acceptance in a country, we take away some of the possibility that people will see language as something that is a benefit to them, that helps them belong, that helps them be part of community, that helps them feel included, that helps them feel competent. Instead of viewing language competence as a barrier to entry, we should be trying to re-frame it as an opportunity, something to help you belong. How is it that we think we can test belonging in this way? How is it that we think we can send people to how ever many hundreds of hours of courses, with however much required attendance, and then they’ll belong? That’s not how belonging works. Belonging is a pull, not a push.

311 in 180 languages

We were plotting some positions, and we have two so far: our angry anecdotal man, and the rise in language requirements for official acceptance in the Netherlands and other European countries. They’re really not so far off from each other, in terms of the approach to language and belonging. Is there something beyond them, positioned in a different segment of our continuum? I’d like to come back to the cultural mosaic, or the vertical mosaic as it’s sometimes called. If you’ve been reading along for a while, you may be used to my position that Canada is very imperfect, but is pretty okay at some things. The concept of the mosaic, officially, is that Canada is a country made up of a number of different cultural and linguistic groups, and that fully blending into one another is not necessary. One thing I appreciated very much when I lived in Toronto was the sheer number of languages in which public services were accessible. 311, the official non-emergency phone number for city services and information is available in, as the official website puts it, “more than 180 languages.” I loved this as a concept when I was living in Toronto, even though it had no personal use to me (maybe because it had no use to me, but a hell of a lot of use for others). The idea that the municipality will try to provide you with services and information in such a tremendous volume of different languages struck me as one of the most beautiful ways to approach linguistic diversity. Instead of imposing a minimum language threshold on participation and access, the city government tries to meet people where they are. How much better, how much easier, and how much nicer to be able to get what you need first, live first, exist first, and bother with English later?

This, then, is the third position on my little continuum. 311 in 180 languages. Arguably, a very different proposition to being yelled at for speaking another language, or forced linguistic competence. Also, I hasten to add, very different from national-level immigration requirements in Canada, which don’t adopt the same policy of meeting people where they are. But what do we find in plotting these three points? From the way I’m writing, it’s obvious that I think one is better than the others, and another is not just worse, but worst. They’re three points on a continuum of attitudes towards the relationship between language and belonging. At one extreme, speaking the dominant language is compulsory, even if your use of a different language hurts no one (and even if your language was there first). At the other extreme, government makes an effort to help everyone access information and services, regardless of what language they feel comfortable speaking. In between, we have compulsory integration through language competence. You are proven to be sufficiently embedded in a country or region by demonstrating a certain capacity to use its official or dominant language, and language competence is a proxy for belonging.

To my mind, the forced integration represented by increasingly-harsh language competence requirements is not the most effective way to foster an organic or internalized sense of belonging. Of course, the ability to speak to your neighbours matters. And of course, civic participation is helped by being able to read the news or understand local issues. But methods like requiring people to speak the language to a higher testing standard, or forcing sameness at all times don’t make the pull-version of belonging happen. The pull happens from having reasons to want integration and fluency, gaining something concrete from speaking the language, and feeling that there are social benefits to the very time-consuming and effortful project of gaining a new language. Wanting to belong and being a little linguistically rough beats a successful but resentful B1 exam any day.