Linguistic and social factors in Turkish-Dutch contact across generations

Abstract

There are certain differences between Turkish as spoken in the Netherlands (NL-Turkish) and Turkish as spoken in Turkey (TR-Turkish). These differences concern issues of linguistic variation and change in immigrant communities and seem to be closely related to social, emotional and linguistic aspects of contact situations. Considering the fact that in a contact situation the social and linguistic relationships are crucial for the outcome of language change, this paper first examines the social values that three different generations give to the language and culture of their host and home communities; then, it discusses the linguistic consequences on the lexical and structural levels of NL-Turkish. The principal conclusion is that possible language shift in the third generation leads to intensive contact with Dutch language and culture, provokes the linguistic factors and, therefore, causes the lexical and structural changes in NL-Turkish. Keywords: Turkish-Dutch, code-switching, loan translation, bilingualism, language contact and change, language shift, (heritage) language anxiety