ABSTRACT
It is a common experience for ethnic minority groups to live in a country where another language than their own is dominant and where native speakers of this dominant language do not speak or understand most of the ethnic minority languages. Intergroup communication is most likely to take place in the majority language. However, the language norms for intergroup communication need not be adopted for intragroup communication, which implies that language can constitute an important characteristic for distinguishing and identifying ethnic minority groups. For identifying ethnic minorities in the Netherlands, language-related criteria are not applied in official statistics. In this contribution we want to discuss the potential value of language-related criteria, both as determinants of ethnicity and as resources for the study of intergenerational patterns of language shift.
