Difficulties to Acquire Albanian as a Second Language by Pre-schooler Age Children of Turkish Nationality in Prizren, Kosovo

Abstract

The acquisition of a second language is one of the central topics in applied linguistics. In Kosovo there are some cities consisting of mixed population, where Albanian, Turks, Bosnians and Serbs cohabit. Since Albanian is dominant population, children of different ethnic backgrounds are following schools in Albanian language, despite the fact that there are schools in their own native languages. Over a period of 30 days, we observed 10 children and extracted the necessary statistics pertaining to our topic. We have observed that the main problems in acquiring Albanian language for children of Turkish ethnic background are the strong influence of Turkish on grammatical features, since Turkish has differet grammar system in comparison with indo-european languages, where Albanian language belongs. Also, the huge number of borrowings from Turkish into Albanian influences the use of such borrowings by Turkish children, while paying efforts to acquire Albanian language.