Mother Tongue of Turkish Immigrant Children in Berlin: to Be or not to Be?

Hristo Kyuchukov

doi:10.17323/2411-7390-2018-4-4-54-64

Abstract

How do bilingual Turkish children develop their mother tongue knowledge in German kindergartens and what are some of the difficulties they face? These are the questions which this paper tries to answer. For this purpose, a study with Turkish kindergarten children from Berlin, Germany was conducted. A total of 40 children were divided into two groups between 3 and 6 years old and tested twice in a year with the TEDIL Test . The test consists of pictures and measures the knowledge of Turkish nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and syntax. All of the children were tested individually by a native Turkish speaker and by the researcher. The testing was done in the kindergarten setting. The results showed that the knowledge of both age groups on different grammatical categories in Turkish was equal on the first test and there were no statistical differences. However, during the second test the group of older children showed a decrease in their knowledge of the grammatical categories in their mother tongue. This paper discusses the factors that influenced the regression in the knowledge of Turkish. This study is one of only a few on bilingual Turkish children and it presents new information about mother tongue loss among kindergarten children, discusses the reasons, and suggests that kindergartens and families should cooperate and work together in order to prevent mother tongue loss from a very early age as well as its effect on the cognitive development of bilingual children.

Highlights

Turkish spoken in Germany and one of the migrant languages has a low status in German society
In the domain of Turkish morphology, children were examined for their understanding of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and prepositions, and in syntax they had to understand the sentences and text in their mother tongue
The principal questions raised by the findings are: Why does the competence of the children in production decline as they grow a bit older? Why can the children not speak their Turkish L1 as well as they grow somewhat older? What are the reasons for the children not knowing their mother tongue well as they progress in school? In the kindergartens there are mother-tongue lessons once a week where a teacher comes and speaks with them in Turkish, reads books, and they are taught to sing songs in Turkish, but during the rest of the time the children are not allowed to speak Turkish

Summary

Introduction

Turkish spoken in Germany and one of the migrant languages has a low status in German society. The children in the study come largely from middle-class families in terms of socio-economic status (SES) Their parents in most cases try to speak with the children in German only, thinking that in this way they help them to be better prepared for school. Considering multilingual children, it is important not to lose sight of the influential role of their mother tongue It has an impact on the social and personal development of the child Bilingual children quickly acquire conversational skills in the majority language (Cummins, 2001, p. 19; Vivian, 2015; Kroll & Bialystok, 2013) and can and quickly participate in the majority society

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