Bilingual intonation patterns: Evidence of language change from Turkish-German bilingual children

Abstract

This article discusses Turkish-German bilingual children's intonation patterns as they relate to processes of contact-induced language change. Bilingual speakers use two distinct rises in both Turkish and German. One rise (L*HH%) resembles a characteristic German rise, while the other (L%H%) resembles a characteristic Turkish rise. The rises pattern pragmatically in ways that are non-normative for both Turkish and German. Although this pattern is not clearly attributable to language interference (either borrowing or shift-induced language change), it is certainly the result of language contact. Fusion is proposed to account for the two-way influence between the two languages.

Turkish German

“…On the level of intonation, Queen (, ) describes the occurrences of fusion of Turkish and German intonational patterns that originate in the speakers' bilingualism. Hybrid or fused forms can be observed: Whereas all bilingual children use German and Turkish rising intonation contours in both German and Turkish, some employ them for turn‐holding (Turkish contour) and information‐structuring (German contour), respectively, thus allocating them with new functions.…”

“…Breaches of this rule may be found in some everyday verbal activities but such breaches usually take on different syntactic forms. Queen (2001) demonstrates how bilingual children (n = 4) use post-positionings as focus constructions, a pattern typical for Turkish, along with a Turkish rising intonation contour. Queen interprets this as 'system interference': A Turkish syntactic construction is transferred into German to fulfil a specific discursive function.…”

Language change in contact languages

“…While their views on prosody are not all together in sync with those we propose here, they do raise important questions which scholars of language change ought to consider. Similarly, Queen (2001) argues for 'transfer' as the mechanism by which intonation patterns of Turkish-German bilingual children incorporate elements of both German intonation and Turkish intonation in their speech. Her precise term is fusion, used to account for influence from both input languages.…”

Intonational variation and change in Scottish Gaelic

“…Similarly, studies of the bilingual repertoire of simultaneous bilinguals indicate a mixing of prosodic systems. Sometimes this process results in the 'fusion' (Queen, 2001) of prosodic elements to form new structures, which do not exist in the native languages of the bilingual or multilingual speaker (Cruz-Ferreira, 1999;Queen, 2001Queen, , 2006. Several instrumental studies have considered prosody in contexts of long-term language contact.…”