Migrants' second language proficiency and their intention to stay

What is it about?

This study focuses on consequences of changes in intention to stay for Dutch language proficiency of recent migrants. It is anticipated that migrants who decide at a later instance to stay longer in the Netherlands have made less language investments and therefore have a lower proficiency than migrants who decided to stay longer or permanently at an earlier stage. Hypotheses are tested using Dutch panel data from the data set ‘Causes and Consequences of Social and Cultural Integration Processes among recent migrants.’ In this survey, migrants have been interviewed twice in the first years after migration to the Netherlands. Results provide that migrants who maintain a temporary intention and migrants who intend to circulate between country of origin and The Netherlands experience the smallest improvement and have the worst command of Dutch at the second wave. Changing a temporary intention to stay into a circular one improves the command of the Dutch language the most, whilst changing a temporary intention into a permanent one also strongly increases second language proficiency. Migrants changing a temporary intention into a permanent one do not differ in their language proficiency at wave 2 and experienced change herein from migrants maintaining a longer or permanent perspective.

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Why is it important?

Most research on language proficiency has used a static approach by only studying it in a single point in time. This study addresses this limitation by questioning whether recent migrants from Poland, Bulgaria, Morocco and Turkey in the Netherlands experience a change of intention to stay over time, and whether a change in intention to stay is associated with (a change in the) Dutch language proficiency. The results of this research thereby highlight that migrants who have an enduring temporal or circular intention to stay but still stay in the host country show relatively low levels of and small improvements in Dutch language proficiency. From a public policy perspective, this means that in order to invest in migrants’ second language proficiency, the intention to stay should be acknowledged.