Receptive multilingualism in an immigrant constellation: Examples from Turkish–German children’s language

Abstract

This article investigates receptive bilingualism in elicited narrative conversations with Turkish–German children who have grown up in a setting of tension between productive and receptive competences: an immigrant situation with subtractive bilingualism. The acquisitional situation of the children tends to be bilingual in the preschool years, sometimes with a preference for Turkish, shifting towards German at the expense of Turkish as the children enter school. The further development of Turkish depends on communicative practices within the family and the attention given to immigrant languages within the school system. From a starting point of discourse passages in which adults speak entirely in Turkish while children respond in German, the article then focuses more closely on the longitudinal development of one child from the age of 7 to 11. The study documents empirical evidence of productive, non-productive and receptive competence in Turkish at different ages, and in particular the understanding and productive use of one complex subordinating construction. Keeping in mind the lexical and grammatical differences between German and Turkish, which preclude receptive multilingualism on the basis of similarity, the article suggests an expansion of the concept of ‘receptive multilingualism’ to include cases of acquired receptive knowledge.