Paper
Converging evidence on contact effects on second
and third generation immigrant Turkish
by
Ad Backus, Derya Demirçay & Yeşim Sevinç
a.m.backus@tilburguniversity.edu
d.demircay@tilburguniversity.edu
yeshimsevinchs@hotmail.com
April 2013
Converging evidence on contact effects on second and third generation Immigrant Turkish.
Ad Backus, Derya Demirçay & 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 contactinduced change is accelerating in the third generation.
Keywords: bilingualism, contact-induced language change, codeswitching, loan translation,
Turkish, research methods, language shift
Introduction
Turkish has been a minority language in Holland for almost half a century now. As immigrant
languages go, it is surprisingly resilient, since well into the third generation Turkish still
seems to enjoy high vitality. Most, if not all, Turks in Holland seem to know Turkish,
ethnolinguistic vitality scores are without exception among the highest of the various
minorities in the country, and this seems to be no different in other West European
countries. Although there are some signs that things are changing, about which we will
report towards the end of this article, this makes the immigrant variety a very suitable case
in which to study the linguistic effects of language contact. Since many immigrant languages
die out after a few generations as the community shifts to the majority language, the
longitudinal development of cross-linguistic influence cannot be studied for very long.
Immigrant Turkish presents us with excellent possibilities, however: the language is in
constant and intensive contact with a majority language, but its speakers do not undergo
language shift. Such persistent immigrant languages are rare (Pennsylvania German comes
to mind), so their study provides contact linguistics with important possibilities for studying
what happens to a language when it is in intensive and prolonged contact with another,
socially dominant, language. Earlier studies have shown that there are many contact
phenomena in the Turkish spoken by the migrant community (we’ll refer to it as ‘NL-Turkish’
from here on). Codeswitching between Turkish and Dutch is frequent and intricate in
conversational data, and NL-Turkish is generally affected by Dutch influence on its structure
and lexicon. Doğruöz & Backus (2009) characterize suspected cases of Dutch influence as
cases of ‘unconventionality’, and we will also adopt this terminology here. That is, if NLTurkish data are compared with the language as it is spoken in Turkey (‘TR-Turkish’),
differences show up. Each one of these NL-Turkish features is potentially caused by language
contact, and a subset of them will be the result of structural borrowing from Dutch. We
prefer to label these cases ‘unconventional’, rather than ‘errors’ for example, because the
yardstick of TR-Turkish is only used as a baseline, from which NL-Turkish has deviated. The
phenomena we observe in NL-Turkish may well be conventionalized elements of that
variety, however, a putative variety we may label ‘Dutch Turkish’.
One of the perennial problems in the study of language contact phenomena is that
conversational data sources are relatively limited in size. Almost all work has been based on
recorded natural conversations, and since studies tend to be done by single researchers and
building a corpus takes huge amounts of time, these corpora are by necessity relatively
small. Until recently, this was not considered a very serious problem because the research
questions that dominated the field, such as what kinds of codeswitching occur and with
which frequency, could generally be answered more or less satisfactorily on the basis of such
data. The limited size of the databases sometimes raises uneasiness, however, for example
regarding the issue whether a pattern claimed not to be possible is really just rare, or
whether distributional patterns found in a particular data set could really be generalized to
an entire bilingual community.
However, it is only when a diachronic perspective is taken that the limited size of the
corpora really becomes a problem. If codeswitching and grammatical deviations are
interpreted as synchronic reflections of language change, more information is needed than
just whether or not a particular phenomenon occurs and, if so, how often. We would like to
know how far the change has progressed, among other things. This issue has become
increasingly relevant, and the motivation comes from two directions. One is contact
linguistics itself, which has always seen an uneasy lack of integration between on the one
hand synchronic sociolinguistic studies of the occurrence and frequency of specific features,
and on the other hand historical linguistic studies of completed grammatical changes that
are the result of past contact situations. Until the last decade, these research traditions were
rarely confronted with each other, despite the early call for such integration in one of the
founding texts of sociolinguistics (Weinreich, Labov & Herzog 1968). The second direction
from which the issue of change has gained paramount importance is the usage-based
approach to linguistic theory (Bybee 2010). In this approach, everything we do synchronically
has diachronic implications, so language is changing constantly. If usage co-determines
linguistic competence, language change must be a central design feature of language, and
therefore an important aspect to account for. We will interpret codeswitching as the
synchronic manifestation of diachronic lexical change, and as a mechanism that brings lexical
change about. Similarly, we see instances of interference or grammatical deviation as
synchronically manifesting, and furthering, structural change. However, the small corpora of
bilingual speech that used to be sufficient for the study of contact phenomena are illequipped for dealing with issues of change, for two reasons: they are too small, and they
yield strictly synchronic data.
In the present paper, we present the results of two recent studies on Dutch Turkish that
both attempt to overcome these methodological problems. Both were done in the
framework of an MA thesis, so they are relatively small-scale and should be considered pilot
studies for the exploration of new questions and new methodologies. At the same time, they
have yielded some interesting results that significantly add to our knowledge of contactinduced change in general, and of Immigrant Turkish in particular. Both studies looked at
codeswitching, loan translation and grammatical interference, using partially overlapping
methodologies. Demirçay (2012) is based on recorded informal conversations and an
acceptability task, all with second generation participants; Sevinç (2012) on interviews and a
controlled video retelling task, with participants spanning three generations.
The text is built up as follows: The next section will survey the communicative repertoire of
the Turkish immigrant community in general terms. The subsequent sections will deal with
three contact phenomena as they occur in our data: codeswitching, the relatively neglected
field of loan translation, and grammatical interference. The final section will survey these
phenomena together, paying attention to both linguistic and sociolinguistic implications.
Repertoire
Dutch Turks, like everybody else, have several varieties at their disposal. Bilinguals make
language choices that they deem appropriate to the situation. To varying degrees, the
presence or absence of bilinguals exerts an influence on the kind of language mixture they
will use, e.g. more Dutch or more Turkish, or force the choice of one of them exclusively.
Virtually all available data, including ours, derive from informal speech, the in-group
vernacular. This even holds for the non-speech acceptability judgment data that we will
report on below, as participants were asked to consider whether or not particular linguistic
features occurred in the language they heard around them every day.
The data therefore only cover a limited part of the total repertoire of these speakers. We
have little information on their Dutch, for instance, beyond what is used in the bilingual
speech data. Similarly, we also have no data on language use in more formal settings,
whether in Dutch or in Turkish. We don’t even know whether it is acceptable to mix the
languages in relatively formal settings. Language choice questionnaires generally address
issues of maintenance and shift, and hence focus on the choice of either Turkish or Dutch in
particular situations and with particular interlocutors (e.g. Eversteijn 2010; Yağmur 2009):
they provide little information on register issues, or on the degree to which the languages
are mixed. Conversational data collected from the early 1980s onwards overwhelmingly
suggest that the simultaneous use of both languages is the default mode of speaking in
everyday settings among bilinguals. Some studies, however, have simulated what happens
when speakers talk to monolingual Turkish speakers, for instance by having participants talk
to monolingual interviewers (Doğruöz 2007; also see our own studies reported on in this
paper), or just instructing them to stick to Turkish.
Having said this, there are good reasons to focus on the everyday vernacular. While the
Turkish immigrant community tends to orient itself towards TR-Turkish norms (as we will
document in the final section), the pressure to conform to those norms is presumably
strongest in settings in which language use is strongly monitored. In informal settings, it may
be argued, metalinguistic awareness is at its lowest, so that we may assume that if we are
going to find contact phenomena, informal conversation is where we will find them. It is
clear, however, that the data we report on give us a snapshot of only a part of the linguistic
repertoire of the participants.
Codeswitching
It has been noticed before that spontaneous conversation in Immigrant Turkish tends to
contain a lot of codeswitching (Backus 1996; 2012), and the two studies we focus on here
confirm this. Demirçay (2012) is partially based on recorded conversational data and they
contain a significant amount of codeswitching. Somewhat surprisingly, the same holds for
the film retellings analyzed in Sevinç (2012), since participants were asked to speak in
Turkish. Another study that forced a monolingual mode, Doğruöz (2007), did indeed yield
largely monolingual Turkish data. In both Sevinç’s and Doğruöz’s studies, the researchers
presented themselves as monolinguals, but it may be a significant difference that the
participants in the study by Doğruöz were second generation university students while
Sevinç’s participants included third generation adolescents. We will argue later that there
are signs that the latter group is undergoing language shift, and thus finds it hard to speak in
a monolingual Turkish mode.
Actually, even Demirçay’s recordings involved a good reason for participants to stick to
Turkish, as they knew that a monolingual Turkish researcher was going to transcribe and
analyze the data. Still, there were 912 cases of alternation and 569 insertions, in a total
number of utterances of 2671. Most of this CS was of a very simple kind, consisting of the
insertion of Dutch discourse markers, especially the affirmative and negative particles ja and
nee into Turkish discourse. The following fragment illustrates this use, showing how ja
functions as a marker of confirmation.
1)
B: O altı puanı hani çöpe atıyosun.
“so you throw away those six points”
S: Ja doğru. Halbuki o çok lazım oluyo artık.
“Yes correct. Whereas, that becomes very necessary now”
B: O çok yani. O altı puan belki.
“That’s a lot then. Those six points maybe.”
S: Ja anlıyom.
“Yes, I understand”
Generally, two main kinds of codeswitching are distinguished, alternation and insertion.
Since we are primarily interested in the make-up of NL-Turkish, we will ignore alternational
CS here. As for insertions, we will focus on the degree to which they provide information on
on-going lexical change in the immigrant variety. Lexical change can be of three kinds:
addition of new words (e.g. loanwords), changed usage of existing words (e.g. semantic
extension or loan translation), and loss of existing words. We have no data on the third kind
(studies in contact linguistics rarely do), and thus we will devote the next two sections to the
first two, starting with Dutch loanwords.
Insertions and loanwords
As in other published accounts of codeswitching, in Immigrant Turkish and in other language
pairs, most insertions were simple nouns or, occasionally, other content words. Similarly in
agreement with what we know about CS in general, more complicated intrasentential
switches occurred as well, such as in example (2). They were relatively rare, but the implicit
understanding that the participants should speak Turkish during the recordings probably has
more to do with that than low usage of this kind of mixing in general.
2) Ş: O kız-ın saç-ı çok çi- was echt blijkbaar heel lelijk
That girl-GEN hair-POSS.3SG very ug- was really apparently very ugly
“That girl’s hair was apparently very ugly”
What is also striking is the insertion of a discourse marker that is frequently used in informal
conversational Dutch, the adverb gewoon ‘just’:
3) Ş: Sarma is moeilijk hoor kolay değil pişirme-si ney.
Sarma is difficult TAG easy not cook-POSS what
“Sarma is difficult, really, it is not easy to cook or”
E: Anne-m gewoon ateş-e koy-uyo piş-iyo öyle.
Mother-POSS.1SG just fire-DAT put-PRES.3SG cook-PRES.3SG like.that
“My mother just cooks it over the fire like that”
If we approach insertional CS from the perspective of its contribution to lexical change, we
need to have information on how the words that are inserted get integrated into the NLTurkish lexicon. Several characterizations are possible. One possibility is that bilinguals keep
the languages essentially separate and literally switch to the other language whenever they
think a word from that language better covers what they wish to convey. In that perspective,
there is no real borrowing, since the Dutch words do not really become part of the local
Turkish. Although there definitely is something to this, since speakers can probably filter out
the use of many Dutch words if they want to, it is also counterintuitive as a characterization
of what goes on in bilingual conditions. More likely, Dutch words are more or less integrated
as integral part of the Turkish lexicon. To assess the degree of integration, there are at least
two questions that need to be addressed. The first is what the words have to add to the
Turkish lexicon: do they encode a meaning for which there is no Turkish word available or do
they enter into competition with a native word, possibly replacing it? And to what extent are
these Dutch words in general use, having diffused throughout the community? The rest of
this section deals with these two questions.
Many Dutch insertions can be analyzed as adding something to the Turkish lexicon, as they
have a highly specific meaning (cf. Backus 2001). That doesn’t mean that the Dutch words
necessarily fill lexical gaps, but the Dutch word will often come with connotations and
shades of meaning that its Turkish equivalent doesn’t have. Since our data are from
students, Dutch words that name concepts from the educational domain are often inserted
into Turkish discourse. Speakers associate these concepts with a Dutch-dominated domain
of life. The same holds for computer terms, such as muis ‘mouse’, and harde schijf ‘hard
disk’, which we found inserted into Turkish clauses. A purely semantic account would lead
nowhere, since these words are not particularly specific semantically, nor do they lack
Turkish equivalents. The fact that they get borrowed is a strong argument for the claim that
meaning is an agglomerate of semantic or conceptual, pragmatic and sociolinguistic aspects.
Demirçay (2012: 38) contains a rare fragment where it is made very visible how new
loanwords enter the language in a contact situation. Speaker Büşra cannot remember the
Turkish word for ‘awning’, and she asks what the word for it is. Sara, her interlocutor, also
does not know, and they use the Dutch word afdakje instead. Most likely, the Dutch word
had been accessible for them all along, but they held out against using it until they realized it
was, at that moment at least, the only label they had for the concept.
4)
a) B: Yemek yi-yo-z tamam mı şey-in alt-ın-da-yız ehh..
“We are eating, okay, we are under the thing, umm..”
b) S: Bahçe-de?
‘In the garden?”
c) B: Eh eh friettent-te.
Uhm uhm French.fries.shop-LOC
“Eh eh, at the French fries shop”
d) S: Ha.
“Oh”
e) B: Ehm hoe noem je zo iets?
“Ehm how do you call such a thing?”
f) S: Die afdakje gibi.
That awning like
“Like that awning”
g) B: Afdakje-nın alt-ın-da-yız.
awning-GEN under-POSS-LOC-1PL
“We are under the awning”
In Sevinç (2012), the controlled set-up allows for a comparison of the attractiveness of Dutch
words relative to each other, since all participants described the same video fragments.
These short videos are constructed in such a way that they tend to elicit particular types of
argument structure, such as ditransitives and various kinds of transitive activities. Obviously,
the study cannot give a lot of information about which words in general occur frequently in
Dutch Turkish, but what we gain is information about which words, given a preselected set,
are used more often than others. Some words, that is, occur in the data of many different
speakers. That they occur at all is all the more significant given that the participants were
asked to speak Turkish during the experiment.
First of all, there is a clear difference between first, second and third generation informants.
The former used almost no Dutch words in their descriptions; the latter generations,
especially the third, a significant amount of them. Partially, this was because they sometimes
found it hard to describe the videos in Turkish and thus switched to Dutch altogether. In
addition, the only participant who didn’t switch to Dutch, and thus stuck deliberately to the
instruction, used an abundance of lexical placeholders indicating lack of fluency, like şey,bir
şey, öbür şey (‘the thing’, ‘a thing’, ‘the other thing’).
Second, a few words clearly stand out as being used by many participants: pannekoek
‘pancake’ (used by all but two of the fourteen participants), blik ‘can’ and hek ‘fence’. A
majority of the participants used these words, often a number of times (though repeated
use in the same data session may be explained through priming). Pancakes are normally
referred to as krep in Turkish, but experience with life in Holland has taught bilingual Turks
that what is referred to as pannekoek in Dutch is not really the same thing as a krep. It looks
different, it is served differently, it is consumed in different types of restaurants, and its
cultural associations are different. It is, therefore, a textbook case of semantic specificity, a
well-known trigger of CS and loanwords (Backus 2001).
Explanations of why the other two words are attractive have to remain more speculative.
Blik ‘can’, for example, tends to be translated with teneke kutu ‘tin box’ or just kutu ‘box’,
and thus may be perceived as being easier (i.e. shorter) than the first and as more precise
than the second, since kutu refers to cardboard boxes as well as tin cans. Several other
words occurred a few times during the recordings: snaar ‘string of a guitar’, emmer ‘bucket’,
mand ‘basket’, trommel ‘drum’, and tak ‘branch’. Although a hypothesis can be mounted for
all of these, it is at this point hard to assess what would constitute evidence for such
explanations. Nevertheless, the fact that participants used these words while doing an
experiment in Turkish suggests they are in general use in Dutch Turkish.
It is important not to limit specificity to a purely semantic perspective, since that would not
explain these data well. Sometimes Dutch words that are fairly general from a semantic
point of view are imported into Dutch Turkish, but once we consider their full socio-cultural
and pragmatic meaning, their borrowing becomes more natural. Demirçay (2012) notes, for
example, that the names of the days of the week are sometimes in Dutch in her data. That
these words get borrowed makes sense once one considers that they are part of the
semantic domains of agendas and planning one’s social life, something typically tied in with
school life. School, of course, is a thoroughly Dutch domain for the participants, as many
other Dutch insertions also suggest.
The other side of the coin is that there are also Turkish words that are not replaced by Dutch
words, as they continue to be used. Unsurprisingly, these are words that either have a very
general meaning, or have a specific meaning that is typically associated with a semantic
domain in which speaking Turkish is the unmarked language choice, such as Turkish
weddings. In fact, the word düğün ‘wedding’ occurs as an insertion in a Dutch sentence in
our data.
To conclude, there are many Dutch words that are probably in general use among second
and third generation Dutch Turks, some more than others. It is likely that the entrenchment
of these words is unevenly distributed over different subgroups in the community,
depending on the type of Dutch that people are exposed to, and find use for. The meaning of
these words, if defined in suitably broad terms to take in pragmatic and sociolinguistic
aspects, goes a long way towards explaining why they were borrowed. However, without
additional data, such as acceptability tasks, little more can be said about the degree of
diffusion of individual loanwords. We carried out such a task for another type of contact
effect: loan translations.
Loan translations
Just like the proportion of Dutch words goes up between first and third generation speakers,
the speech of the younger generations also contains more covert influence from Dutch, in
the form of loan translations and unconventional grammatical features. Grammar will be
dealt with in the next section; the present section discusses the phenomenon of loan
translation, which is rather lexical in nature.
As Sevinç (2012) included similar data, i.e. retellings of the same video stimuli, from
participants in three generations, her study can be seen as a cross-sectional study of ongoing
change. First generation informants produced no loan translations, while there were several
in the data produced by the later generations, and more of them in the third than in the
second generation. Demirçay (2012) counted no fewer than 110 cases of lexical
unconventionality in the transcriptions of her recorded natural conversations among second
generation participants; many of these seem to be loan translations. This almost certainly
underestimates the real number, since loan translations are notoriously hard to identify.
Following the classification suggested in Backus & Dorleijn (2009), we include cases of
semantic extension, or ‘one-word loan translations’, in which native words are used with
meaning that they don’t have in TR-Turkish but which are associated with their Dutch
equivalents. An example is the use of the adverbial geri ‘back’ in the same way as its Dutch
equivalent terug, including the contrastive meaning implied in the following example (5),
where the word is used in a position where TR-Turkish would have used tekrar ‘again’. The
example also illustrates the difficulty involved in proving beyond doubt that a loan
translation has taken place. Dutch wouldn’t actually use terug in this particular lexical
context; instead the adverbial weer ‘again’ would be preferred. However, terug is often used
in similar contexts (e.g. ik pak het weg; zet zij het weer terug; ‘I take it away, and she puts it
right back’), and it is likely that this has influenced the general use of the translation
equivalent geri in NL-Turkish.
5) Ben
I
ateş-i
fire-ACC
yak-ıyo-m,
alevlendir-iyo-m,
set-PRES-1SG blaze-PRES-1SG
söndür-üyo
her şeyi,
extinguish-PRES.3SG everything
bu
this
geri
back
mahved-iyor.
ruin-PRES.3SG
“I’m setting the fire, blazing it; she extinguishes it again, ruining it.”
TR-Turkish: Ben ateşi yakıyorum, alevlendiriyorum, bu tekrar söndürüyor her şeyi,
mahvediyor.
Dutch: Ik maak het vuur aan, laat het oplaaien, maakt zij het weer uit, en verpest het
weer.
‘I set the fire, make it blaze, she extinguishes it again, ruining it again’
Prototypical loan translations are combinations of content words, as in compound nouns,
and collocations between an adjective and a noun, or between a verb and an object. The
data include such examples as ev doktoru (literally ‘house doctor’) for ‘general practitioner’,
modeled on Dutch huisarts, where TR-Turkish would use aile hekimi (literally ‘family doctor’,
with a different word for ‘doctor’). The preference for the cognate doktor is probably not a
coincidence: even though the Dutch model word actually uses a different word (arts is a
synonym), the generic designation in Dutch for someone with a medical profession is dokter.
Another recurrent loan translation is the combination of bakmak ‘to look’ with the word for
‘television’ or the names of TV programs (Demirçay 2012: 44; Sevinç 2012: 76). In these
combinations, TR-Turkish uses two different verbs (izlemek and seyretmek) that both mean
‘watch’; Dutch Turks seem to be replacing them with the most common verb for ‘look,
watch’. Motivation for this presumably comes from the fact that Dutch uses its most
common verb for looking, kijken, in this context. The effect of this may be that the TR-
Turkish convention are breaking down in the minds of NL-Turkish speakers. Note, in example
(6) below, that the object noun is marked with the dative case, the case that bakmak
subcategorizes for. The other two verbs would require the accusative case (or none in the
particular context of this example). The Dutch equivalents generally use a construction in
which the object noun does not co-occur with a preposition, so where it really is construed
as a direct object. Theoretically, this could unleash competition in the mind of the speaker:
between the TR-Turkish constructions (and the Dutch model) that stimulate marking the
object noun as a direct object, with the accusative case, and the constructional frame of
bakmak, which favors the use of the dative. The latter has won out in (6), but in other
instantiations in our data the dative is absent (as in 7). In turn, this shows us something
about the limitations of the translation process.
6) Ben hiç
bak-mı-yor-um
televizyon-a (Demirçay 2012: 44)
I
never look-NEG-PROG-1SG television-DAT
“I never watch the television”
TR-Turkish: Ben hiç izle-mi-yor-um/seyret-mi-yor-um televizyon.
7) Hollandaca
Dutch
şarki
song
değil ama
not
but
daha çok, Hollandaca
more much Dutch
televizyon
TV
bak-ıyor-um. (Sevinç 2012: 76)
look-PROG‐1SG
‘Not Dutch songs, but I watch Dutch TV more.’
TR Turkish: Hollandaca şarki dinlemiyorum ama daha çok Hollandaca televizyon
izliyorum.
Further examples of loan translations and semantic extensions are given in Table 1, all taken
from Sevinç (2012). These were all attested in the speech of one or two participants, so we
have no evidence that they are widespread. This indeterminacy, however, is the normal
state of affairs in contact linguistics, unless we start extending our methodological palette.
One attempt at that will be discussed in the next sub-section below.
NL-Turkish
TR-Turkish
Dutch
English
eski ‘old’ + Noun
denoting a person
(e.g. eski bayan ‘old
woman’
yaşlı for people; eski
for things
oud, in both cases
old
kostüm, ‘suit’
(literally ‘stage
clothes’)
takım elbise
müzik yapmak ‘to
müzik çalmak
make music’ (literally (literally ‘to hit
‘to make music’)
music’)
kostuum ‘suit’
suit
muziek maken
(literally ‘to make
music’)
to make music
koklamak to denote
transitive use of
‘smell’ (e.g. ‘he
smelled smth’)
kokmak ‘smell’
ruiken for both uses
(transitive) versus
koklamak ‘smell’
(intransitive, e.g. ‘the
flowers smell nicely’)
smell
kucak vermek ‘to
hug’ (literally ‘give a
hug’
kucaklamak or
sarılmak (both ‘to
hug’)
een knuffel geven
(literally ‘give a hug’)
or knuffelen (‘to
hug’)
to hug
alkışlamak + N için
(applaud + N + for),
‘to applaud’
alkışlamak + N-ACC
applaudiseren voor N to applaud for N
(‘applaud for N’)
Table 1: Loan translations and semantic extensions: a sample
It is clear that bilinguals sometimes use CS and sometimes resort to loan translations. So far,
contact linguistics has not occupied itself with the question what conditions the choice (see
Backus & Dorleijn 2009 for an overview). However, if we see the two phenomena (as well as
grammatical interference) as part of a set of related strategies to deal with the pressures
and opportunities of bilingualism, we should try and investigate them in relation to one
another. One hypothesis could be that linguistic selection is a zero sum game: given a
particular meaning, the bilingual has one entrenched form available, and that can be a Dutch
word or expression (codeswitching), a Turkish translation of the Dutch model (loan
translation), or an old and trusted TR-Turkish form. Another hypothesis is that the choice
between CS and loan translation has nothing to do with the entrenchment of the forms
themselves: if an attractive Dutch model presents itself, it will be realized as CS or as loan
translation depending on the higher-level decision of language choice (if CS is allowed, there
will be a CS; if Turkish must be used in the present conversation, a loan translation is used).
A third hypothesis is possible, too: the three forms mentioned above are all in competition,
as they all have their own degree of entrenchment, and their chance of ending up as the
selected form depends on both their actual degree of entrenchment and on the particular
features of the conversational setting, including whether or not language choice is an issue.
This question is hard to address on the basis of usage data alone. It is unlikely that any
corpus will be large enough to contain sufficient opportunities to refer to the concept
involved, so that inspection of relative frequencies is not an option. Our conversational data
suggest that CS and loan translation are complementary: expressions occur either as CS or as
loan translation, but we have no examples of both occurring in the same data. One principle
that seems to find some support in the data (also see Backus 1996) is that loan translation is
particularly common for collocations that contain a verb with general meaning, such as ‘do’,
‘take’ and ‘give’. Recall that CS is facilitated by semantic or pragmatic specificity.
However, there is only so much that conversational data can tell us. When the participants in
Demirçay (2012) talk about exams, they refer to ‘passing an exam’ with the loan translation
sinavı almak ‘take an exam’: we have no attestations of the codeswitched form tentamen
halen yapmak (‘exam get do’, with the Dutch collocation inserted into a Turkish verb phrase)
That doesn’t mean at all, however, that participants wouldn’t use this on other occasions:
we just cannot know. Other types of data should be used, however, to weigh in on this
matter. We used two kinds of data: Sevinç (2012) had participants talk about more or less
the same things by giving them all the same stimulus material. As a result, it can be checked
which loan translations, if any, recur in the speech of several participants. Demirçay (2012)
administered an acceptability judgment test, to see to which extent particular loan
translations were accepted as the normal way of speaking by a majority of speakers. We will
now discuss the results.
Controlled data
Several loan translations recurred in the video retellings reported on in Sevinç (2012). Two
were particularly frequent, being used by virtually all third generation participants and most
second generation ones. The first one is el vermek ‘to shake hands’ (literally “to give hand”),
loosely based on Dutch de hand schudden. This example nicely illustrates again how
complicated it is to find conclusive evidence for cross-linguistic influence, even in lexical
cases. The literal translation for el vermek, een hand geven, does occur frequently in Dutch,
but it is more restricted in use than de hand schudden, which is actually the closer match
with the TR-Turkish convention el sıkışmak. The other widespread loan translation is a
clearer case, and since it shows some type variation it may be seen as a loan construction
rather than a loan expression: it concerns the combination of any musical instrument and
the verb oynamak ‘to play’. TR-Turkish uses the verb çalmak ‘hit’ in these cases, but this
seems to have given way to oynamak, spurred on by the universal use of spelen ‘play’ in
these collocations in Dutch. In the data, oynamak is used with the object nouns gitar,
trompet and trommel (‘guitar’, ‘trumpet’ and ‘drum’, respectively), the first one a cognate
between Turkish and Dutch, and the last two Dutch words.
Judgment data
Demirçay (2012) developed a judgment task to see whether loan translations attested in the
data were recognized by speakers as the conventional way of saying something. The
rationale behind this was that if speakers accepted these expressions as a normal part of
Turkish, this would be evidence for their entrenchment. Participants (N=25) were asked to
rate, on a 7-point scale, the degree to which the stimulus items were or could be heard in
the everyday language of the immigrant community. In addition to attested loan
translations, the stimulus items also contained literal translations of expressions that
surfaced as codeswitches to Dutch in the conversational data, and the TR-Turkish
equivalents of both categories.
The results show that judgment data and frequency data do not support each other as much
as we expected. Attested loan translations and their TR-Turkish equivalents were judged
about equally acceptable. Thus, on the one hand, the attested loan translations are indeed
signs of ongoing change in NL-Turkish, as they are generally judged as acceptable, but that
doesn’t mean that the variety has dropped the TR-Turkish equivalents. As far as the
judgment data are concerned, the two expressions seem to be in competition as two
synonyms that for now should both be seen as part of the language. Borrowing does not
necessarily mean attrition of the native equivalent. Corpus data would not have told us this.
The other interesting result was that the loan translations that were created for the task by
translating Dutch portions of the data, i.e. multiword codeswitches, were judged as
significantly less acceptable than both their TR-Turkish equivalents and the attested loan
translations. What this suggests is that people are able to recognize that particular word
combinations do not occur. It also suggests that a zero sum game interpretation of the
distribution of codeswitches and loan translations may have some empirical support. While
Dutch lexical influence appears to manifest itself in two ways, as expected, i.e. as
codeswitches (matter borrowing; Matras & Sakel 2007) or as loan translations (pattern
borrowing), it does not seem to target the same meaning in both ways at the same time.
Interference
The data yielded a number of cases of unconventional syntax. Prominent cases include
Dutch-like word order, plural marking after numerals (where TR-Turkish doesn’t use the
plural) and unconventional case marking. On the whole, however, the extent of
unconventionality in syntactic structure is limited, a conclusion also reached by Doğruöz &
Backus (2009).
Adpositions
The first example we discuss here illustrates that there is a grey area between a loan
translation and grammatical interference. If the pivotal element is a grammatical morpheme,
the result could, with equal justification, be categorized as either (Backus 2009). The NL-
Turkish speaker who uttered the expression in example (8) has used the locative
postposition içinde to express that there is an apple in the tree, where TR-Turkish would just
mark the tree with locative case. On the basis of the English translation, it would appear that
this is a simple case of LT (‘there is an apple in the tree’), and indeed, in Dutch an equivalent
translation is possible. However, the more common Dutch way of rendering this clause uses
a different verb (‘hang’) and this subcategorizes for a different preposition (‘on’). This does
not seem an obvious source for the Turkish postposition içinde. Hence, we cannot really
decide whether this case of unconventionality is an instance of loan translation or not.
8) Ağaç-ın
için-de
elma var.
tree-GEN
inside-DAT
apple there.is.
“There is an apple in the tree”
Ağaç-ta
tree-LOC
elma var.
apple there.is.
(NL Turkish)
(TR Turkish)
Er
hangt een
There hangs a
appel aan
apple on
de
the
boom (Dutch)
tree
?Er
is
There is
appel in
apple in
de
the
boom (Dutch)
tree
een
a
Word order
Doğruöz & Backus (2007) did not find much evidence for changes in word order, and the
current data likewise turned up only few examples. Probably the OV order is relatively stable
because it’s in opposition to other orders, including SVO, that have clear pragmatic
meanings. This probably helps keep interference at bay. However, cracks in the system have
been signaled for years, and some of them are also visible in our data. An example is (9), in
which the dative object is placed behind the verb, where it is also found in the Dutch
equivalent. It may be significant that this example involves a postpositional phrase, rather
than a prototypical direct object. Such phrases bear a greater resemblance to adjuncts, and
those can be placed postverbally in Turkish.
9) Fare
bak-ıyor
çöpün
mouse
look-PROG.3SG
dustbin
‘The mouse is looking inside the dustbin’
Fare
mouse
De
the
çöpün
dustbin
muis
mouse
içine
in-DAT
kijk-t
in
look-PRES.3sg in
içine.
in-DAT
(NL Turkish)
bak-ıyor
look-PROG.3SG
(TR Turkish)
de
the
(Dutch)
afvalemmer
dustbin
Plural marking
Unconventional plural marking is found in the speech of the second and third generation
participants (Sevinç 2012: 68; Demirçay 2012: 46). In all cases, this involved a plural noun
following a numeral (such as iki ‘two’, birkaç ‘some’ or pek ‘many’), which goes against the
norms of TR-Turkish. In example (10), the noun adam ‘man’ is marked for plural. Note that
Dutch does mark the noun as plural.
10) Iki
adam-lar*
yürü-yor.
Two man-PL
walk-PROG.3PL
“Two men are walking”
Iki
Two
adam
man
Twee man‐nen
two man-PL
(NL Turkish)
yürü-yor.
walk-PROG.3PL Iki
(TR Turkish)
wandel-en.
walk-PRES.3pl
(Dutch)
Case marking
The data contain various instances of unconventional case marking when seen from a TRTurkish perspective, and by way of example we will discuss these in greater detail. These can
be interpreted as an on-going contact-induced language change (cf. Doğruöz & Backus 2009)
if they gain in frequency in the younger generations, and seem to parallel Dutch structures.
We will see that the first criterion holds, but that demonstrating parallelism with Dutch is
not always easy.
Sevinç (2012: 66) found 29 instances of unconventional case marking, and 27 of them
occurred in the data from second and third generation participants. Of course, the data
contained many more instances of case marking, so the overall proportion of
unconventional case marking is not high. There may be a change in progress, but it is not
very advanced yet.
Can these instances be attributed to Dutch influence? This is a tougher question to answer;
definite proof of foreign influence on linguistic structure is notoriously hard to find. The
problem is not that arguments for foreign influence are hard to make, but that there is often
an alternative explanation in terms of internal development, and available data often do not
allow a decision as to which of the two explanations is the superior one. However, if a clear
model can be found in Dutch, and a hunt for alternative explanations yields nothing, then
Dutch influence may be assumed (Thomason 2001). Unconventional case marking comes in
various kinds, as others have found as well (cf. Bolonyai 2002 on American Hungarian).
Sometimes the accusative is substituted by the dative, as in examples (11-13) below.
Superficially similar, these three examples were probably generated in different ways. In
(11), the verb ‘greet’ normally subcategorizes for the accusative, construing the person
greeted as a direct object. Dutch is unlikely to have anything to do with this, as in Dutch the
person who is being greeted is also construed as the direct object. The dative in the NLTurkish utterance may rather be due to the low level of transitivity of this verb, a factor
suggested as responsible for similar cases in Doğruöz & Backus (2009). Similarly, in (12),
direct Dutch influence is unlikely. The most likely explanation is sheer confusion, a genuine
error. However, such errors may still be contact-induced, as contact may have the effect of
breaking down the case marking system in general. This may be because of limited usage
(both in terms of active use and of passive exposure), the phenomenon underlying both
attrition and ‘imperfect acquisition’, or it may be because of Dutch influence (Dutch has no
case markers, and the absence of them in Dutch may cause instability in the Turkish system),
or because of both. Finally, in (13), a case for direct Dutch interference may justifiably be
made. Dutch uses a prepositional phrase as the complement of the verb here, and therefore
does not construe the person applauded as a direct object. It is entirely possible that Turkish
speakers of the second and third generations equate Dutch prepositional objects with
dative-marked objects in Turkish, so that ‘voor’ may be hypothesized to be translated as the
dative case marker in this example.
11) Kadın
kişiler-e
selamlı-yor. (NL-Turkish)
woman
people-DAT greet-PROG.3SG
‘The woman is greeting the people’
Kadın
woman
De
the
kişiler-i
people-ACC
vrouw
woman
groet
greet.PRES.3sg
12) Kutu-ya
üstün-e
box-DAT
on-DAT
‘He put the box on it’
Kutu-yu
box-ACC
Hij
He
selamlı-yor. (TR-Turkish)
greet-PROG.3SG
üstün-e
on-DAT
zet
de
put.PRES.3sg the
koy-du.
put-PAST.3SG
de
the
mensen
people
(Dutch)
(NL-Turkish)
koy-du.
(TR-Turkish)
put-PAST.3SG
doos er
bovenop
box there on.top
13) Adam bayan-a
alkışlı-yor.
Man woman-DAT clap-PROG.3SG
‘The man is applauding the lady’
(NL-Turkish)
Adam bayan-ı
alkışlı-yor.
Man woman-ACC clap-PROG.3SG
(TR-Turkish)
(Dutch)
De
The
man
man
klapt
voor
clap.PRES.3sg for
de
the
vrouw
woman
(Dutch)
In two other cases, the unconventionality is in the opposite direction: an accusative replaces
a dative. In (14), the verb is ‘to get angry at’ and in (15) it is ‘hit’. In the first case, the change
to the accusative is surprising if one is looking for Dutch influence, since the Dutch
equivalent verb uses a prepositional object, and such objects are perceptually probably
closer to dative than to accusative marking (see above). Note, in addition, that the verb is
low in transitivity, which arguably stimulates the dative rather than the accusative (as it does
in TR-Turkish). In the second case, on the other hand, explanations of interference and
general transitivity seem equally strong, since the verb is prototypically transitive, but does
subcategorize for a prepositional object, not a direct object, in Dutch.
14) Adam bir
çocuğ-u
kız-ıyor.
(NL-Turkish)
man a
boy-ACC
get.angry-PROG.3SG
‘The man is angry at a boy’
Adam bir
man a
çocuğ-a
boy-DAT
De
the
is
is
man
man
kız-ıyor.
(TR-Turkish)
get.angry-PROG.3SG
boos op
angry on
een
a
jongen (Dutch)
boy
15) Adam top-u
vuru-yor.
man ball-ACC
hit-PROG.3SG‘
‘The man is hitting the ball’
Adam top-a
man ball-DAT
De
The
man
man
(NL-Turkish)
vuru-yor.
hit-PROG.3SG‘
trapt tegen
hits against
(TR-Turkish)
de
the
bal
ball
There are other cases of unconventional case marking, and every time it is difficult to say
what has caused it, or which factor has had the most influence. Clearly, there are changes
going on in NL-Turkish, and, just as clearly, they are not always instances of borrowing from
Dutch. The picture that arises is that there are various cases of unconventionality, the
reasons for which have to be ascertained on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes the origin of
the change will be relatively easy to determine; in most cases there will be various candidate
explanations and there is often no telling which one is the right one, or whether they have
worked in interaction, and how. Apart from direct Dutch influence, changes may also be
caused by general vulnerability of syntactic constructions. Such vulnerability seems to result
from low frequency and vague or non-salient meaning.
Social correlates
We have one more source of data, which, in a more indirect way, also supports the
conclusion that Turkish is changing considerably in the immigrant context. Sevinç (2012)
includes the results of extended interviews with third generation participants about their
language situation. They show clear signs of anxiety about their language use, and give some
telling examples of incidents in which they were confronted with what they and those
around them interpret as low proficiency in TR-Turkish. As linguists we may describe their
communicative repertoire positively as a mixture of Dutch and Turkish features, with much
of the Turkish used side-by-side with Dutch and containing features we describe as ‘NLTurkish’, but speakers are not likely to share such a positive interpretation. Instead, they
describe a vicious circle of low proficiency due to limited usage, inducing avoidance of having
to speak monolingual Turkish, lowering the amount of usage further, reducing proficiency
further, etc. This brings to mind the phenomenon described as the ‘tipping point’ in studies
of language shift (Dorian 1989), when shift suddenly accelerates after having developed only
slowly for generations (also see Daller, Treffers-Daller & Furman 2011: 102).
A relevant point to consider is that until recently, there has not really been a large third
generation to speak of, if third generation refers to children of parents who are both from
the second generation. The marriage pattern of immigrant Turks has always been that a
spouse was looked for in Turkey. This has meant that in most families there would be one
parent who was monolingual, or else very much dominant, in Turkish, having emigrated only
as an adult. It is only natural that the language used in the family domain in such cases
would be Turkish. Studies on language choice have so far indeed reported that children
overwhelmingly use Turkish with at least one of the parents while growing up (see for
example Eversteijn 2010). However, more recently, probably due to changes in Dutch
immigration policies, second generation immigrants have started to marry each other, or
even non-Turks. This means we see, for the first time, a real third generation growing up,
and we will report some signs that language shift to Dutch may now be taking off. This
conclusion will be presented with caution, since we have a small sample and the issue of
maintenance versus shift was not the topic of our investigation. However, members of the
third generation expressed an unmistakable anxiety about their Turkish, an anxiety which
often leads to the choice of Dutch rather than Turkish whenever possible.
Methodological implications
We have reported on two pilot studies exploring new methods of dealing with issues in
contact linguistics. The issue is not whether there are limits to what we can do with natural
conversational data – we know that there are – but whether the controlled retelling
experiment and the judgment tasks really allow us to say anything more about language
change. If change is defined as shifts in the degree with which the units are entrenched in
the mental representations of individual speakers in a community, such data should tap into
that variation. The larger questions behind this have to do with the very nature of linguistic
competence, whether it is largely independent of usage (as generative theories argue) or
directly reflected in usage (as usage-based approaches claim). Though we don’t claim to be
able to say much about this issue on the basis of our data, we do think we have shown that
using several methodologies in the same study provides a more comprehensive picture of
bilingual competence.
If all three methods provide information on competence, one would expect the results of
each to reinforce those of the other methods. They do so only to a certain extent. First, the
elicited video retellings confirm earlier studies based on conversational data that younger
generations undergo more contact-induced change, both in lexicon and in grammar. Second,
acceptability judgments confirm that loan translations found in conversational data tend to
be judged as acceptable by second generation speakers. On the other hand, the judgment
data also show that combinations not found in the conversational data, including TR-Turkish
conventional collocations and literal translations of Dutch collocations surfacing as such in
the conversational data (i.e. as codeswitches), are judged differently. The TR-Turkish
conventions may not surface in our recorded conversations, but they tend to be judged as
acceptable, so they have not disappeared from the participants’ competence. Relying purely
on conversational data would not make this information available. Similarly, the low
acceptance of the constructed loan translations likewise shows us something we could not
possibly know if we only relied on conversational data. The combination of natural, elicited,
and judgment data clearly provides us with a more differentiated empirical basis, and thus
leads to a more adequate description. In future work, we hope to improve on the
methodology, extend it to other contact phenomena (codeswitching and interference), and
add additional methods, such as focus group interviews.
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