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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 711

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Immigrant Turkish: Emergence of a new dialect caused by language contact?

Authors: Onar Valk, Pelin; Backus, Ad
Submitted by: Onar Valk, Pelin (Tilburg University, Netherlands, The)

While Turkish immigrants in Western Europe orient themselves to the norms of Standard Turkish, their Turkish is constantly being influenced by the European language they also speak (Backus, 2004). As a result of language contact, slowly but surely, new varieties of Turkish seem to be evolving, with loss of certain features and/or with the influx of words and structures taken from the European languages. In this talk, we will focus on Immigrant Turkish in the Netherlands. We will present recent work, in which we investigate further to what degree Turkish has changed in the immigrant setting. Specifically, we will highlight changes in one empirical domain not investigated much before in the Dutch context, a domain which seems to be heavily affected by contact nonetheless. This is the domain of clause combination, specifically subordination. Experimental research was carried out on Dutch Turkish and also on Turkish in Turkey (TR). One of our remarkable findings is that we have found no instances of non-finite indirect reported speech (RS) in Dutch Turkish although TR Turkish often employs non-finite subordination for this. We propose that language contact leads to the finite use in RS which is also available in Turkish. The preference goes to the RS construction that is equivalent to the Dutch style. We have found an overall abundance of finite subordination in Dutch Turkish at places where non-finite was also possible, which confirms the avoidance of non-finite subordination. We will explore how we can account for our data from the perspectives of both Generative and Usage-based linguistics. In discussing our current work, we will also deal with a methodological issue: while virtually all work so far has been based on recordings of spontaneous speech, the field of language contact is running up against the limits of what you can do with such data (Gullberg et al., 2009). In our current project, we have been trying a range of experimental techniques to answer questions regarding the degree to which we can say that changes suggested by the spontaneous speech data are really entrenched in people’s linguistic competence (rather than reflecting superficial effects of momentary interference at the moment of speaking). In our talk, we will briefly go over some of these techniques we use to investigate subordination. Finally, we will discuss whether these new data provide us with a better basis on which to debate the issue whether or not the changes we see are sufficient to claim that Turkish as spoken in the immigrant contexts qualifies as a new dialect.

References:

Backus, A. (2004). Turkish as an immigrant language in Europe. In T. Bhatia & W. Ritchie (Eds.), The Handbook of Bilingualism (pp. 689-724). Oxford: Blackwell. (Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics, 15).

Gullberg, M., Indefrey, P., & Muysken, P. (2009). Research techniques for the study of code-switching. In B. E. Bullock, & J. A. Toribio (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook on linguistic code-switching (pp. 21-39). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.