Preservation and Adaptation in Turkish as a Heritage Language (PATH) - A Natural Language Laboratory in a Small Dutch Town

Project Information

PATH

Grant agreement ID: 843131

DOI

10.3030/843131

Project closed

EC signature date 12 April 2019

Start date 1 September 2019

End date 28 July 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 214 158,72

EU contribution

€ 214 158,72

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITETET I TROMSOE - NORGES ARKTISKE UNIVERSITET
Norway

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PATH (Preservation and Adaptation in Turkish as a Heritage Language (PATH) - A Natural Language Laboratory in a Small Dutch Town)

Reporting period: 2019-09-01 to 2021-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The European experience cannot be fully described without any reference to bilingualism. New language pairs continue to emerge as a result of migration both within the EU and from outside into the EU. Differences in individual experiences as well as societal, national and regional practices result in massive variation in bilingual outcomes, making it difficult to test the degree to which any potential factor causes such variation. PATH aims to reduce some of this variation by controlling for the regional dialect factor. Accordingly, it looks at aspects of the bilingual grammar of Turkish-Dutch speakers who migrated from a particular region of Turkey where a unique micro-dialect of Turkish is spoken. Speakers of this language variety moved to a small town in The Netherlands in the 1960s and 1970s to work at a nearby steel factory. This close-knit community of Turkish speakers makes a unique natural laboratory, and thus, provides the researcher with an opportunity to test variation across generations as Turkish and Dutch languages interact on a daily basis by keeping factors related to dialectal variation as well as certain social background variables constant.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The findings of PATH so far support the view that bilingual speakers, who are proficient in both languages and use both of them on a daily basis, have unique skills in using both languages at the same time, even within the same sentence. Known as code-switching, such mixing of two languages is not practiced randomly but is instead rule-governed by systems just as monolingual language use is subject to grammar rules. PATH shows that heritage speakers, bilingual speakers who acquire a home language in infancy and a societal language typically in the first year at school, are no exception to this observation. They are not only proficient in two languages but also extremely efficient in mixing them as they speak. PATH has found support for the view that heritage speakers have substantial differences from those who acquire the societal language in later stages in life.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

PATH shows that better knowledge of the societal language as well as the heritage language makes heritage speakers more capable of keeping the two grammars apart even by speakers who code-switch on a daily basis. While these two languages combine in unique ways during code-switching, it does not necessarily mean that syntactic properties of the societal language easily leak into the heritage language grammar. On the contrary, at least in the case of argument structure properties, better knowledge of Dutch and Turkish makes heritage speakers better keep the two grammars apart. PATH has direct implications to European language policy and strategies.

A village in the eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey, where a unique Turkish micro-dialect is spoken.