Turkish Heritage Speakers' Reasons for Code-Switching in the United States

Introduction

The emergence of Turkish communities in the United States (U.S.) dates back to the 1820s when almost 300,000 Turkish people emigrated to the U.S. from what was then called the Ottoman Empire (Karpat, 2004). Since this period, the number of Turkish immigrants in the U.S. has continued to rise due to social, political, economic, and educational reasons, resulting in over one million Turks and the maintenance of Turkish. The continuous growth of the Turkish population in the U.S. and the maintenance of Turkish to a large extent, therefore, make the U.S. an ideal place to study language contact between Turkish and English.

There is now a large body of studies about Turkish as an immigrant language in contact with Dutch, German, Danish and English. For almost three decades, scholars in Europe have been inquiring into the changes that occur in the speech of bilingual Turkish speakers, largely seeking possible explanations for how and why different generations and age groups code-switch. For instance, Backus (e.g. 1996, 1998, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2012), who has written several books and countless articles on diaspora Turkish, analyzed the code-switching patterns in the speech of Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands; Pfaff (2000) in Germany, Jørgensen (2010) in Denmark, Kurtböke (1998) in Australia, Türker (2000, 2005) in Norway; and Boeschoten and Verhoeven (1987) in the Netherlands as well. The scholars also examined topics such as ethnic identity, maintenance of Turkish and the degree of proficiency in Turkish and host languages. Despite the considerable number of studies conducted in Europe, particularly in the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Norway, there is a lack of grammatical and sociolinguistic studies of code-switching found in the speech of Turkish speakers living in the U.S.

The present study thus aims to fill this gap by focusing on a highly important and recurring topic in contact linguistics, code-switching. The study explores Turkish heritage speakers’ reasons for code-switching from a sociolinguistic perspective. The paper is organized as follows. The following section provides a brief history of Turkish immigration to the U.S. and the current Turkish communities in the U.S. while section 3 provides an overview of functions of code-switching followed by research questions and methodology. Section 5 offers an analysis of the functions of code-switching found in the speech of Turkish-English bilingual speakers followed by a discussion of the findings. The study concludes with recommendations for further research on Turkish-English code-switching.