A Choice for the Child: Ethnolinguistic Affiliation of Children of Native-Immigrant Couples in Finland

Camilla Härtull , Åbo Akademi University
Ognjen Obucina, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Jan Saarela, Åbo Akademi University

We examine ethnolinguistic affiliation of children of mixed native-immigrant couples in Finland, contributing to the literature on the transmission of identity and cultural markers in mixed families. In Finland, parents must register their child’s language shortly after birth, which provides a rare opportunity to study parents’ identity choices for their children under official categorization. Finland’s native population comprises two equal groups – Finnish speakers and Swedish speakers, the latter being a numerical minority – allowing us to examine how children are registered when one parent represents a foreign-background minority and the other a native minority with the same constitutional rights as the majority. We use intergenerationally linked register data with information on both the parents’ and the child’s registered mother tongue. We distinguish between Finnish-immigrant and Swedish-immigrant couples, as well as couples in which both share the same native language or have a foreign language, and examine the language-gender combination within these couple types. We find that among immigrant-Swedish couples, 16-33% of children are affiliated to the ethnolinguistic group of the immigrant parent when the mother is immigrant. This share decreases to 4-18% when the mother is native from the Swedish-speaking minority. Among Finnish-immigrant couples, the proportion of children registered as foreign-speaker is lower, or 7–15% when the father is Finnish-speaking and 2-7% when the mother is Finnish-speaking. When both parents share a native mother tongue, nearly all children are registered with it, whereas for parents with a foreign language, 75–90% of children are registered with a foreign language.

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 Presented in Session P4. Migration, Migrants, and Mobility