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Part of
Studies in Turkish as a Heritage Language
Edited by Fatih Bayram
[Studies in Bilingualism 60] 2020
► pp. 229–264

Chapter 10
Turkish in Germany

An adult-state twice-told-tale approach to not-entirely-balanced childhood bilingualism

| Adam Mickiewicz University
This is a qualitative case study of Turkish as a heritage language in Germany, viewed in the context of one adult speaker’s bilingualism: Sadık, a young worker and Turkish-German bilingual born and raised in a western German industrial town. The study is empirically based on a language-biographical reminiscence, which surfaces in both languages: first in German, then in Turkish, in a more or less informally elicited narrative. The language-biographical perspective is taken as a starting point for explorations into structural comparison at the discourse and sentence level. The aim is to identify phenomena that have a function in verbalising language-biographical memory and that can at the same time be cross-linguistically compared.
Keywords: Turkish-German bilingualism, diaspora Turkish, twice-told tale, sociolinguistic vitality, bad language syndrome, majority language anxiety, language-biographical memory, complexity, noun phrase modification, complement constructions, vulnerable morphosyntax, narrative density, evaluative stance
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical perspectives: Heritage bilingualism and heritage Turkish
    • 2.1Sociolinguistic vitality
    • 2.2The discourse structure of language-biographical narratives
    • 2.3Morphosyntactic issues
  • 3.Sociolinguistic context of a disinherited bilingual biography
  • 4.The passport: Detailing, condensation and evaluation in discourse
    • 4.1Interjections and exclamations
    • 4.2A chunk of background details about an emotion
    • 4.3Chunks of evaluation inserted into the plot
    • 4.4A chunk of detail to ensure understanding
    • 4.5Plot-advancing, detailing parataxis
    • 4.6Detailing by means of discourse-level finite hypotaxis
  • 5.Vulnerable morphosyntax: Modification and complementation
    • 5.1Noun modification: Details squeezed into an NP
    • 5.2Complement constructions: -ma versus -DIK, and case
  • 6.Conclusion and outlook
  • Notes
  • HIAT conventions
  • References
Published online: 18 November 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.60.10her
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