Title: Turkish in contact with German: Language maintenance and loss among immigrant children in Berlin (West)
Abstract:lntroduction The phenomenon of massive migration of workers frorn Turkey to the Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands, and other northwestern European countries has brought about a situation of...lntroduction The phenomenon of massive migration of workers frorn Turkey to the Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands, and other northwestern European countries has brought about a situation of particular interest to sociolinguistics and psycholinguists concerned with language maintenance, language loss, and language-contact phenomena. Here the interplay of social factors with linguistic universals and language particulars is brought into sharp focus because the languages in contact are genetically unrelated and typologically very different from each other. In this Paper, I present some results of two studies of second- and third-generation preschool and primary school children of Turkish rnigrants in West Berlin. I look at structural linguistic effects in the grammatical subsystems which express nominal reference (lexicon, case and number marking, modification, anaphora). These differ in their inherent complexity and in the extent to which their expression differs structurally from the contact language, German. Before turning to the studies themselves, I will first set the stage with some brief comments on the social and dernographic background of migrants in Berlin and on the educational policies which establish the framework in which the children's language acquisition, language contact, and language use rnust be placed. Second, I will briefly describe the studies and the particular subsamples of preschool and primary school children whose language production is considered.Read More
Publication Year: 1991
Publication Date: 1991-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 94
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