Couple Formation by Mother Tongue of Immigrants in Finland 1987-2023

Jan Saarela , Åbo Akademi University
Linus Andersson, University of Turku
Caroline Uggla, Södertörn University

The possibility to communicate using the same mother tongue carries advantages for establishing romantic relationships. In a globalised world of migration, this means that one might expect extensive sorting by language. Likewise, the inclination of a migrant to partner with a person who speaks the main language of the destination country, rather than a person who has the same, or another, mother tongue, captures a relevant dimension of assimilation. While these arguments are uncontroversial, the extensive literature on characteristics of partnership formation of migrants typically operationalise language only by proxy, using country of origin or migrant status. Moreover, the evidence on migrant partner sorting by language is largely cross-sectional. This is problematic because language is a skill that is developed over time. The present study draws on administrative data from Finland, which has a register of each person’s unique mother tongue, which enables us to, for the first time, identify the mother tongue of both migrants and non-migrants for a full population across time. We study language sorting across time since arrival among adult foreign-born men and women who immigrate to Finland without a partner between 1987 to 2023. For migrants arriving as children, we study the effect of age at arrival on the same outcome. Using piece-wise constant exponential hazard models, we show that same-language unions is the most common form of first partnerships for both men and women, but that the likelihood of partnering with a Finnish speaker becomes increasingly common over time and age.

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 Presented in Session 114. Mixed Families and Migrant Populations