Turkish in the Netherlands

This paper is about Dutch influence on the variety of Turkish spoken by immigrants in the Netherlands. The community is under constant pressure to shift to Dutch, but maintenance figures are nevertheless very high. The result is a contact situation in which the entire community is bilingual; everyday interaction features much codeswitching and the minority language Turkish undergoes contact-induced changes in both lexicon and grammar. Often, these changes are direct borrowings from Dutch. In this paper, we will be searching for evidence of structural change in the Turkish spoken in the Netherlands (NL-Turkish) by second generation immigrants, and see whether these changes can be traced back to Dutch influence.