(In)Complete acquisition of Turkish among Turkish German bilinguals in Germany and Turkey: an analysis of complex embeddings in narratives

Although most researchers recognise that the language repertoire of bilinguals can mvary, few studies have tried to address variation in bilingual competence in any detail. This study aims to take a first step towards further understanding the way in which bilingual competencies can vary at the level of syntax by comparing the use of syntactic embeddings among three different groups of Turkish/German bilinguals. The approach of the present paper is new in that different groups of bilinguals are compared with each other, and not only with monolingual speakers, as is common in most studies in the field. The analysis focuses on differences in the use of embeddings in Turkish, which are generally considered to be one of the more complex aspects of Turkish grammar. The study shows that young Turkish/German bilingual adults who were born and raised in Germany use fewer, and less complex embeddings than Turkish/German bilingual returnees who had lived in Turkey for eight years at the time of recording. The present study provides new insights in the nature of bilingual competence, as well as a new perspective on syntactic change in immigrant Turkish as spoken in Europe

Erecting a statue in the land of the fallen: gendered dynamics of the making of Tunceli and commemorating Seyyid Rıza in Dersim

This article analyses the gendered, spatial and emotional dynamics of the Dersim Genocide (1937/38) and attempts to commemorate the genocidal violence. It traces the transition initiated by pro-Kurdish municipalities in Turkey’s public sphere during the relatively liberal political atmosphere of the early 2000s, which switched from the spatial politics of denial to that of mourning. In illustrating the role of gendered military violence both in the destruction of Dersim and in the formation of Tunceli, the article underlines the role of spatial militarisation in upholding a regime of denial. It specifically focusses on the gendered aesthetic framing of the statue of Seyyid Rıza (1863–1937, inaugurated in 2010), who became a symbol of resistance after being executed as part of genocidal violence. The statue of Seyyid Rıza challenges the Turkish denial regime by turning a previously ungrievable dead body into an object of pride. However, Seyyid Rıza’s statue could preserve its precarious place and remained within the ‘limits of sayable’ by not offering a future prospect that competes with the military masculinist aesthetic regime of the statues of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk