Moving between Languages: Turkish Returnees from Germany

The aim of the present chapter is to offer a comprehensive overview of linguistic and sociolinguistic aspects of the migration movements between Turkey and Germany. From a sociolinguistic perspective the migration from Turkey to Germany and vice versa since 1961 is unique because it is one of the few situations worldwide which involves huge numbers of migrants in both directions. From a linguistic perspective it is highly relevant to look into this language pair because Turkish and German are structurally very different languages. After a short overview on the Turkish work migration to Europe, we focus on work of a specific subgroup namely the returnees. These are children and young adults who were either born in German-speaking countries or moved there at a very young age. They are, in general, dominant in German when they return to Turkey. This dominance gradually changes and returnee students, seven years or more after return, do not show significant differences in Turkish from their monolingual peers. This holds not only for general proficiency tests but also for in-depth analysis of more complex formulaic sequences in Turkish. These findings are reassuring in the sense that returnees can reach proficiency levels in Turkish that are comparable to their monolingual peers. The studies therefore show that returnees are different from second language learners because they can still learn formulaic sequences after the age of twelve, which is virtually impossible for second language learners who start learning a language after puberty. One has to bear in mind, however, that the returnees had already had Turkish input in Germany, although this was mainly oral and there was little support for Turkish at school level. In summary, research on returnees and Turkish-German bilinguals can give valuable new insights into many aspects of bilingualism, such as how language dominance can change over time, and how this is related to changes in the patterns of usage of both languages, as well as how language influences cognition in bilinguals.!