Linguistic Effects of Immigration: Language Choice, Codeswitching, and Change in Western European Turkish

Abstract

Since the 1960s, Western Europe has been host to a large Turkish immigrant community. While many such communities shift to the majority language in the space of a few generations, language maintenance is remarkably successful in this community. This is partially because of continuing immigration, but it is also typical of a transnational identity that characterizes many bilingual communities in modern Europe. The linguistic effects of this on-going contact situation include extensive codeswitching and slowly emerging changes in the lexicon and syntax. These are contained in a range of speech styles that show that in such modern migrant communities, the way in which different subgroups utilize their multilingual repertoire varies considerably, depending on background factors such as gender, locality, age, and socio-political identity.

Language abilities in bilingual children: The effect of family background and language exposure on the development of Turkish and Dutch

“…Our investigation into Turkish-Dutch bilingual children’s language abilities in both Turkish and Dutch through CELF and TEDİL, two tests designed for monolingual populations, has revealed large inter-child differences in terms of test scores. These are in line with previous observations of a large intra-community variation in Turkish migrant communities in terms of the extent to which the members use Turkish in their everyday lives and in how they position themselves as members of an ethnic Turkish community in a Dutch-speaking society (Backus et al (2010). The results can, however, be used as a starting point in research on language development, as they provide us with information on children’s language development in their two languages.…”

“…the tendency to use more deictic temporal adverbs as opposed to one anchor tense in narratives; cf. Backus et al, 2010 and Section 2 above.) It is crucial that these differences, which may importantly influence bilingual children’s Turkish language test scores, are taken into account in the discussion of the language development of bilingual Turkish-Dutch children with Turkish as a heritage language.…”

“…An explanation for this observation may be that in these families, in which Turkish is used as a heritage language, there is more variability in the extent to which different languages are used at home and the Turkish used at home may to a greater or lesser extent converge with Standard Turkish. Indeed, intra-community variation has been named as one of the specific characteristics of Turkish immigrant communities (see Backus et al, 2010).…”

“…Recent research reveals that Turkish as a heritage language differs from Standard Turkish in a number of ways, including the frequent use of (lexical) code-switching (Backus, 2011; Sevinc, 2014), dialect leveling (Schroeder & Stolting, 2005), the avoidance of syntactically complex structures, and deviant use of case morphology and verbal inflections (Backus, 2004; Chilla & Babur, 2010; Schroeder, 2016). An overview of research on the characteristics of this variety can be found in Backus et al (2010). These patterns are typical characteristics of Turkish as a heritage language (San, 2018), rather than the result of an incomplete acquisition, something which must be taken into consideration in studies examining children’s acquisition of Turkish in language contact situations.…”

Effects of language dominance on home reading practices of bilingual families

“…Many bilingual families have positive views of bilingualism and aim to support language and literacy development in both of the families’ languages, not just the majority language (Genesee, 2004; King & Fogle, 2006). Positive views of bilingualism have been reported by parents of Cantonese–English children in the United States (Leung & Uchikoshi, 2012), Turkish–Dutch children in the Netherlands (Backus et al, 2010; Bezcioglu-Goktolga & Yagmur, 2018), bilingual families in Australia (Piller & Gerber, 2018), and of particular interest to this paper, French–English families in Montréal (Ballinger et al, 2020). More specifically, parents of French–English bilingual children reported that they valued bilingualism both for their children to be able to communicate with family and friends, and for the potential advantages it might offer for education and future employment opportunities (Ballinger et al, 2020).…”