Socioeconomic Differences and Perceived Discrimination amongst Linguistic Groups in Europe (2018)

Matias Reus-Pons , Universitat de les Illes Balears
Joana Mª Petrus Bey, Universitat de les Illes Balears
Miquel Àngel Coll Ramis, Universitat de les Illes Balears

The study of minorities in social sciences has a long tradition. However, most studies so far have focused on the concepts of race, ethnicity, or migration. Migrants and ethnic minorities tend to have lower socioeconomic status and to experience discrimination more often than the majority population. To our knowledge, no study so far has analysed socioeconomic position and perceived discrimination according to linguistic origin. Our objective is thus to analyse socioeconomic differences between minority and majority linguistic groups, as well as perceived discrimination amongst them across Europe. We distinguish between speakers of an official language (majority), speakers of a minority language (regional or historical languages), and speakers of a foreign language. Data derive from the European Social Survey Round 9. We report preliminary descriptive statistics by linguistic group on perceived discrimination, and a series of socioeconomic domains, namely education (average years of education), employment (ever being unemployed), and income (feeling about current household income). Preliminary results show that our classification based on language does not correspond with migratory background nor with ethnicity, and thus provides new insights on the composition and characteristics of European societies. Both speakers of minority and foreign languages were more likely to perceive discrimination more often than speakers of an official language. In contrast, the socioeconomic profile of speakers of a foreign language tended to be rather similar to that of speakers of an official language, while speakers of a minority language tended to perform worse on the socioeconomic domains analysed.

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 Presented in Session P1. Postercafe