ABSTRACT
Serbian and Croatian are two varieties of what has been conceived as one language on the basis of its grammatical properties. As all the statistical publications available so far refer to immigrants from the former Yugoslav republics and descendants of at least one such parent as ‘Yugoslavs’, this chapter proceeds to use the term ‘Yugoslavs’ in the old sense, as a cover term for Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Macedonia, and the new Yugoslavia, the latter consisting of Serbia and Montenegro. It focuses on the demographic, socio-cultural and educational background of Yugoslavs in the Netherlands, on the distribution and status of language varieties, and on patterns of language choice, language acquisition and language shift. There is a clear bias towards high school education, in which Yugoslav children are better represented than any other group, and an under-representation of higher types of education, but not of an extreme type.
