Bilingualism, identity and social tolerance

Abstract

This study examines the impact of bilingualism on identity and social tolerance among students of Tabriz University, accordingly the level of social tolerance is investigated among the students with different ethnic backgrounds. Every year many students from different ethnic backgrounds that have different maternal language from country's official language attend the University of Tabriz. This survey research was constructed among the male and female students in various areas in the 2011-2012 academic years. The sample size is 370, which were selected by multi-stage cluster sampling. Results show that bilingual students have flexible attitude towards groups, beliefs and acts, also those who are fluent in more than one language act better than monolingual people in social tolerance, coping skills and group identity. In other word, there is significant relation between coping skills, identity with bilingualism.

 

Keywords: Bilingualism, language, group identity, social tolerance, coping skills