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According to acculturation theories, members of immigrant second-generation minorities hold a broader cultural competence — a bicultural fluency — for living in two cultures, compared to members of the native majority who are mainly limited to the mainstream experience only. In this paper, we employ a new research method to acculturation research — the Imitation Game — to investigate this claim. Our case concerns second-generation Finnish Somalis and majority Finns. With a mixed-methods approach, we examine degrees of cultural competence among members of each group in their mutual interactions. Contrary to acculturation theories, the second-generation Finnish Somali cohort does not display greater bicultural fluency than the Finnish native majority. We show evidence of how cultural fragmentation among the Finnish Somalis and the prevailing social distance between them and majority Finns limit their chances of developing bicultural fluency. The result demonstrates partial sociocultural marginalization among the Finnish Somali second generation, and may indicate a higher risk of marginalization among second-generation immigrants than acculturation theories have suggested. This study presents the Imitation Game as a new way of outlining the sociocultural foundations of ethnic relations in the context of migration and integration, and pinpointing potential domains of social exclusion between or cultural division within groups.

As a part of their normative theory of expertise, Harry Collins and Robert Evans proposed that interactional expertise forms the third kind of knowledge, located between formal propositional knowledge and embodied skills. Interactional expertise refers to the capability to grasp the conceptual structure of another’s social world, and it is expressed as the ability to speak fluently the language spoken in that social world. According to their theory, it is a key concept of sociology, because it refers to the understanding and coordination of joint actions between members of different social groups. Collins and Evans have further claimed that minority social group members tend to outpace majority social group members in terms of interactional expertise. Drawing on ethnomethodology, we detail the ways in which interactional expertise is displayed and revealed in experiments. This allowed us to specify the underlying reasons for the distribution of interactional expertise between social groups. Our results indicate that the difference between the groups depends on whether a group is either actively maintained or a passive latent category, because interactional expertise provides for not only the crossing of social boundaries but also their maintenance. The minority social group members’ greater interactional expertise or competence is therefore proven to be illusory.