By Ad Backus, Derya Demirçay and Yeşim Sevinç
Abstract
Studies of language contact have largely been based on analyses of contact effects, such as codeswitching or grammatical interference, in recordings of spontaneous in-group conversation among bilinguals. This also holds for the sizable body of research on the Turkish immigrant community in The Netherlands. However, with the growing acceptance of a usage-based approach as a basis for linguistic research, exclusively relying on this method has become a serious limitation, as various questions and issues become important that cannot be studied well with purely synchronic conversational data. In this paper, results are reported from two pilot studies with a wider range of research methods, including interviews, acceptability tasks and controlled elicitation. They allow conclusions about the degree to which various types of Dutch influence, such as loanwords, loan translations and grammatical features, have penetrated the Turkish as spoken in the immigrant setting. All in all, the extent of Dutch influence continues to be moderate, but there are signs that contact-induced change is accelerating in the third generation.
Keywords: bilingualism, contact-induced language change, codeswitching, loan translation, Turkish, research methods, language shift
How to quote (APA): Backus, A., Demirçay, D. & Sevinç, Y. (2013). Converging evidence on contact effects on second and third generation immigrant Turkish. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 51).
Read the full working paper here: Converging evidence on contact effects on second and third generation immigrant Turkish. here.