Praten Zonder Stokjes

The Chinese community in the Netherlands has long been overlooked by governmental policy makers. Due to important social and economic changes within the community, this situation has changed: the discussion on an official minority status has been initiated. This has led to an increase in the amount of research on the position of the Chinese in Dutch society. However, very few studies have been made of the linguistic situation of the Chinese community. In this study, the language choice behavior of Chinese parents and children was looked into. The main question was whether an intergenerational shift from the use of Cantonese to the use of Dutch in interactions with other Chinese could be established. The research results show that this was indeed the case: where parents use Cantonese nearly all of the time, children use Cantonese only in half of the cases Differences in language choice patterns seem to be determined by the informants' judgements of their proficiency in Cantonese and Dutch, and, to a lesser degree, by their identification with their own ethnic community.