The production and perception of Turkish evidentiality markers by Turkish-German returnees

Abstract

The study contributes to research on the development of the heritage language after return to the country of origin and examines whether the ultimate attainment of the heritage grammar after many years of residing in the country of origin brings returnees to a level compatible with that of monolinguals. We focus on the production and perception of evidentiality markers in the heritage Turkish of Turkish-German bilinguals who returned to Turkey after finishing a German high school and have been residing in Turkey for more than 11 years. Two production tasks (a narrative task and a discourse completion task), as well as a grammaticality judgement task were used in the study. The data analysis revealed that the production and perception of evidentiality by the returnee participants diverged from those of the monolingual control group. The divergence manifested itself in ungrammatical uses of evidentiality markers in the context of the indirect evidentiality and less sensitivity to grammatical and ungrammatical items comprising direct and indirect evidentiality markers. The findings of the study suggest that after many years of residing in Turkey the language behaviour of the returnee participants still possesses features that are typical for heritage speakers.

Interfaces in the returnees’ heritage language: Is the complete (re-)activation possible?

“…If to compare our findings with the previous research on the HL development after return to the country of origin, our findings are inconsistent with those of Daller andYıldız (1995), Treffers-Daller, Özsoy &van Hout (2007) and Treffers -Daller, Daller, Furman and Rothman (2016) who reported that returnees do not differ significantly from monolingual users of Turkish in their overall proficiency, use of collocations and syntactic embeddings once they find themselves and reside in the monolingual environments of the heritage language. On the other hand, our results support the findings of Kaya-Soykan et. al.…”

“…The HL development of Turkish returnees has a special status in the topic of inquiry for the reason that return migration is rather common for this particular migrant population, with many second- and third-generation Turkish immigrants choosing to return to Turkey. So far, there have been a number of studies that examined different linguistic and social aspects of the process, including the (re-)activation of the heritage Turkish of returnees after their return to the country of origin (Daller & Yıldız, 1995; Kaya-Soykan et al, 2020; Treffers-Daller et al, 2007, 2016). In one of the earliest studies Daller and Yıldız (1995) examined the overall proficiency in the heritage Turkish of Turkish-German returnees using a C-test.…”

“…On the other hand, Kaya-Soykan et al (2020) examined the production and perception of evidentiality markers in the heritage Turkish of returnees and compared their performance on the structured tasks with that of the monolingual control group. The findings of the study showed that the perception and production of evidentiality markers by the returnee participants, who had returned to their country of origin after puberty and lived in Turkey for many years (minimum 11 and maximum 30), still would diverge from those of the control group.…”

“…So far, several studies have examined the HL development after return to the country of origin (Daller & Yıldız, 1995; Kaya-Soykan et al, 2020; Treffers-Daller et al, 2016). Some of these studies (Daller & Yıldız, 1995; Treffers-Daller et al, 2007, 2016) focused on the overall proficiency of returnees, their use of collocations and syntactic embeddings in the heritage Turkish and demonstrated that about eight years after return, the heritage Turkish of returnees becomes indistinguishable from those who had lived all their lives in Turkey.…”

“…Some of these studies (Daller & Yıldız, 1995; Treffers-Daller et al, 2007, 2016) focused on the overall proficiency of returnees, their use of collocations and syntactic embeddings in the heritage Turkish and demonstrated that about eight years after return, the heritage Turkish of returnees becomes indistinguishable from those who had lived all their lives in Turkey. On the other hand, Kaya-Soykan et al (2020), focusing on the evidentiality in the (re-)activated heritage Turkish, showed that even after more than ten years of residence in Turkey, the evidentiality markers of the returnee participants differed from the homeland variety, suggesting that the extent of HL activation may be domain-specific.…”