Preservation and Adaptation in Turkish as Heritage Language (PATH) - MSCA (2019-2022)
Preservation and Adaptation in Turkish as Heritage Language (PATH)
Languages exhibit changes occurring within only a couple of generations in bilingual situations, especially in those cases where the affected language is a heritage language. At the same time, speakers of heritage languages preserve particular properties of the dialect they speak, such as in cases that result from migration, being geographically isolated from the native context of their language. In order to provide a description and explanation of contact-induced language change on the one hand, and isolation-induced dialect preservation on the other, PATH examines the degree to which cognitive and external factors play a role in variation and change in Turkish as a heritage language. In order to do so, it closely examines a variety of morpho-phonological, lexical and syntactic properties of a micro-dialect of Turkish as spoken by a community in a small town in the North Brabant province of the Netherlands.
