Gastarbeiterdeutsch & Linguistic Characteristics of Second Generation (German)-Turks in Germany

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Duisburg-Essen (Anglistisches Institut), course: Pidgins & Creoles, language: English, abstract: [...] Their children, the (so-called) second generation who were mostly
born in Germany had a not so fundamentally different relationship to Germany which is
actually supposed to be their home country. There are, however, some vast differences
between these generations, especially in terms of their German language proficiency. Most of
the second (or third/fourth) generation of Gastarbeiter today are bilingual speakers, generally
more fluent in German than in the respective language of their parents. Of course, these
generations share more "distinctive" features than sole linguistic ones: the majority of the
guest workers' children are, in full contrast to their parents, in many ways integrated into
German society and do have a much closer relationship to Germany as a whole. Whereas
most Germans are monolingual, speaking "some" (more or less acceptable) English or French
or Italian etc., the Germans (!) with foreign descent have two languages at their disposal -
whether they succeed in both languages (or in either of them!) is, of course, another question,
many of which, however, can be tackled using a socio-linguistic approach. For the purpose of this paper I shall focus on some linguistic phenomena of
Gastarbeiterdeutsch, not only referring to the (highly restricted) German language proficiency
of the first generation of Turkish guest workers (circa 1960-1975) but also on their offspring
(circa 1975-). Since I am of Turkish descent myself -my father, a guest worker himself, had
his "first shift" in a German coal-mine in August 1965- I have been (and still am) dealing very
closely with the language-related particularities (and oddities) of a Turkish dominated
parents' house somewhere in North Rhine-Westphalia. In order to explain these, to