The acquisition, maintenance, and re-activation of Turkish in the diaspora: The case of Turkish-American and Turkish-German returnees

In this talk, she address a fundamental issue at the heart of our understanding of bilingualism and language acquisition: how flexible and malleable are grammars after puberty? Heritage speakers, early bilinguals born in an immigration context, show structural differences in their heritage language due to reduced input in the heritage language in childhood or transfer from the majority language. The Permanence Hypothesis states that linguistic knowledge acquired during the critical period, underused or underdeveloped throughout childhood, remains available when re-activated in adulthood. Building on this, she ask whether heritage speakers can achieve full attainment of the heritage language if they are tested in a naturalistic setting, when they are fully immersed in and using the heritage language as a majority language. The phenomenon of interest is evidentiality (i.e., overt marking of source information) in Turkish. In the first part of the talk, Aylin present judgement and production data from Turkish heritage speakers residing in the United States as well as Turkish-American returnees and Turkish monolinguals in Turkey. In the second part, she turn to Turkish heritage speakers residing in Germany and Turkish-German returnees in Turkey, comparing their performance with that of their Turkish-American counterparts. By doing so, she aim to show how situational factors such as the sociopolitical status of the former dominant language, the size and vitality of Turkish-speaking communities, and their educational and socio-economic status may affect the degree of successful re-activation of Turkish as a minority language in these contexts. These comparisons provide a unique lens into the (extra-)linguistic factors that may play a role in language learning across the lifespan as well as the flexibility of linguistic knowledge as we age.