In the Ear of the Listener: The Role of Foreign Accent in Interethnic Friendships and Partnerships

This article examines the association between accented speech and the formation of friendships and partnerships among immigrants and native-born majority residents in Germany. Drawing on the sixth wave of the German extension of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries, we analyze a neglected aspect of language — pronunciation — and find that speaking with a foreign accent is a more important correlate of the incidence of interethnic partnerships than of interethnic friendships. We argue that beyond its primary function of understandability, accented speech possesses socially communicative power. Accent transmits signals of an individual’s foreignness and cultural differences and, thus, becomes an additional marker of social distance. Such signals serve as a greater obstacle to more consequential intimate interethnic relations such as partnerships. Our findings extend the scholarly debate on the role of symbolic boundaries in social interactions between ethnic groups by yet another important boundary maker — accent.

Can I Be Myself Around Natives?

The social integration of the ever-growing number of refugees in receiving societies is of major importance. Perceived discrimination has been found to predict fewer friendships with natives over time. But what short-term mechanisms explain this effect? In a sample of 115 refugees living in Germany we (i) replicated the long-term discrimination-social-integration relationship, (ii) found short-term associations between discrimination and affective, motivational, and behavioral tendencies not to befriend natives, and (iii) showed authenticity to mediate this short-term relationship: with increasing discrimination, refugees felt less like they could show their authentic selves around natives, which in turn impaired tendencies to befriend natives. Discrimination may impede the formation of interethnic friendships by instilling feelings of inauthenticity. Implications for prevention measures are discussed.

Observing the Interethnic Friendships in Elementary and Secondary Religion-Based School

Friendships provide opportunities to build empathy and practice social skills. Being friends with ethnically diverse peers can create opportunities for academic and social learning different from the opportunities afforded by same-ethnic friendships. Through my observation, I had been finding that elementary and secondary school students are less likely to have friends of a different ethnic — even from the beginning to the end of a single school year, as they progress in school. My observation show that most childhood friendships are formed in classrooms, but children tend to form friendships with others of their own ethnicity, with interethnic friendships decreasing across ages and grades. The observation looked at student and classroom factors that affect the likelihood of children forming friendships across ethnic. On an individual or student level, I looked at age, ethnic, and psychosocial factors, including sociability, internalizing behavior (such as worrying or feeling sad) and externalizing behavior (such as acting out or getting in trouble). I also examined factors related to classroom context, including teacher support, whether teachers treat students with varying levels of academic achievement differently, and competition among students. Results suggest that same-ethnic friendships increase over the school year, with greater increases among white and older children. Externalizing behavior predicted a greater increase in same-ethnic friendships, particularly among ‘domestic’ (Javanese: ‘cah kene dewe’) students. Teachers and classroom context influenced student friendships in two different ways. It suggests that teachers may make a difference in how students select and maintain friends. Classroom support -- measured by student perceptions of teachers' warmth, respect, and trust -- predicted less of an increase in same-ethnic friendships from fall to spring. In last, my observation points to the need not just for diverse schools, but also for teachers to foster classrooms where students and teachers support one another, and social and academic hierarchies are not dominant, which could increase the likelihood of students developing and maintaining interethnic friendships.

Waarom er minder empirisch bewijs bestaat voor de contacttheorie dan velen beweren : Een kwantitatieve cultuursociologische kritiek1

The finding that ethnic prejudice is particularly weakly developed among those with interethnic friendships is often construed as confirming the so-called ‘contact theory’, which holds that interethnic contact reduces racial prejudice. This theory raises cultural-sociological suspicions, however, because of its tendency to reduce culture to an allegedly ‘more fundamental’ realm of social interaction. Analysing data from the first wave of the European Social Survey, we therefore test the theory alongside an alternative cultural-sociological theory about culturally driven processes of contact selection. We find that whereas interethnic friendships are indeed culturally driven, which confirms our cultural-sociological theory, contacts with neighbours and colleagues do indeed affect ethnic prejudice. They moreover do so in a manner that is more complex and culturally sensitive than contact theory suggests: while positive cultural stances vis-à-vis ethnic diversity lead interethnic contact to decrease ethnic prejudice, negative ones rather lead the former to increase the latter.