Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, November–December 2011; 25(11–12): 989–997
Implications of bilingual development for specific language impairments in Turkey
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SEYHUN TOPBAŞ _ Department of Speech and Language Therapy, DILKOM, Anadolu University, Eskişehir, Turkey (Received 7 September 2011; Accepted 7 September 2011)
Abstract The potential impact of bilingualism on children’s language development has emerged as a crucial concern for Turkey, but so far it has not been addressed from the point of view of language disorders. This short review examines the potential impact of bilingual language development for language impairments in Turkey, with special emphasis on the largest minority population speaking Kurdish and Turkish.
Keywords: multilingualism, specific language impairment, Turkish, Kurdish
Introduction The potential impact of bilingualism on children’s language development has emerged as a crucial concern for Turkey, but so far it has not been addressed from the point of view of language disorders. Historically, Turkey has had a wide range of cultural diversity; it has been home to many ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities. Thus, many languages – such as Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, Albanian and Armenian – have been spoken since before the time of the Seljuk and Ottoman Empires. During the past decades, a high proportion of migration to several major cities has been witnessed as well. Thus, Turkey has to welcome new languages and cultures. A critical issue in this situation is the language of children’s education. Due to this issue, recent debates have focused on the language and educational rights of children whose mother tongue is not Turkish. This short review will discuss the potential impact of bilingual language development for language impairments in Turkey with special emphasis on the largest minority population, which speaks Kurdish and Turkish.
_ Correspondence: Seyhun Topbaş, Department of Speech and Language Therapy, DILKOM, Anadolu University, Yunus Emre Campus, 26470 Eskişehir, Turkey. E-mail:
[email protected] The author dedicates this article to Martin J. Ball in honour of the insights he has contributed on the world’s languages. ISSN 0269-9206 print/ISSN 1464-5076 online © 2011 Informa UK Ltd. DOI: 10.3109/02699206.2011.622425
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Sociolinguistic and educational attainment in the context of education for all The population of Turkey is 73 million. A recent national poll entitled Who Are We? has shown that Turkish is the mother tongue for 84.54% of the inhabitants. Kurdish is the second most frequently spoken language with 12.98% (Kurmanji and Zaza dialects), Arabic is the third with 1.38%, Circassian 0.11%, followed by Armenian 0.07%, Greek 0.06%, Jewish languages 0.01% and other languages with 0.85% (KONDA, 2006). However, none of these languages, other than Turkish, have been used officially. Looking back at the Ottoman times, the society was classified as Muslims and nonMuslims; the non-Muslim people – such as Greek, Armenian and Jewish minorities – preserved their cultural and educational rights, including the right to open and manage their own schools. In her historical review, Karahan (2005) states that during Ottoman Empire times there were 22 non-Islamic and 47 ethnic groups. Furthermore, 1746 journals and magazines were published in 22 different languages. Since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, governmental policy has been to keep the national identity under one nation and one official language. Consequently, linguistic diversity was recognised as a challenge at the national level, which gave rise to the unification of education (irrespective of the ethnic, linguistic or religious backgrounds of the students). Within this framework, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne shaped Turkish minority policy, which limited the rights only on behalf of the non-Muslim minorities of Turkey. However, as stated in the Minority Rights Group report, Turkey de facto restricted the scope of these provisions to Armenians, Greeks and Jews, excluding all other minorities (Kaya, 2009). Beginning with the Act of Unification in 1924, Turkish became increasingly important and with the Turkish Constitution adopted in 1982, Turkish was declared the language of the state and that no language other than Turkish shall be taught as mother tongue to Turkish citizens. In fact, the Constitution guarantees the right to learning and education to everyone, regardless of their language, race, sex and religion, with special rehabilitative measures for those in need of special education and protection. Further, it states that no privilege shall be given to any person, family, class or category of people in education. Despite the law, statistics show that access to education by the minority groups is not achieved fully in practice (Kaya, 2009). Although it is not possible to provide definitive statistics about the literacy rate among minorities, figures from south-eastern and central-eastern Turkey (which are mostly populated by Kurds) are alarming: the literacy rate is 73.3% in the south-eastern region and 76.1% in the central-eastern region. These rates are much lower than the national figures which is 89% according to UNICEF 2005–2008 statistical indicators (http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/Turkey_statistics.html) (literacy rate for þ15 years adult population is 91% according to World Bank statistics http://data.worldbank.org/country/turkey). There is, moreover, a gender gap in these regions, with women accounting for the majority of illiterate individuals (72.9% in the south-east and 73.57% in the central-east) (Topbaş, 2006). Gürsel, Uysal-Kolayşin, and Altındağ (2009) reported that among those individuals whose mother tongue was Kurdish, half were not elementary school graduates. They reported that one out of three people over the age of 15 in Southeast Anatolia did not know how to read or write, and the illiteracy rate was 29%. They attributed these extremely high illiteracy rates to the educational gap between ethnic groups, which often are defined by different languages (Darbaz and Uysal-Kolaşin, 2009; Gürsel et al., 2009; Uysal-Kolaşin and Güner, 2010). The report of Minority Rights Group members, working on behalf of the education rights for minorities, indicates that poverty significantly affects access to education in almost all
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regions of Turkey (Kaya, 2009). A survey carried out by GÖÇ-DER (Association for Immigrants, Social Assistance and Culture) in Diyarbakır, Batman, Istanbul, Van, Izmir and Mersin observed that half of displaced people lived below the poverty level. Most of them did not study at any school. Another survey carried out among displaced people living in Istanbul showed that 14% of children aged 13–18 years had never attended any school; 12.9% dropped out of primary school. A survey carried out on poverty and street children in 2007 showed that 64.9% of children working on the streets of Diyarbakır were migrants (Kaya, 2009). According to a poll conducted in six cities in south-east Turkey, 65% of the residents in this region speak Kurdish at home, 52% speak a language mixture of Kurdish and Turkish outside the home, while 21% speak only Kurdish (cf. Yıldız and Düzgören, 2007: 32). Consequently, this pattern of language use causes a great barrier for those who move to large cities, where it is important to speak Turkish. Today, there is even greater growth of linguistic diversity. A recent report indicates that there are now 36 languages spoken as first language in Turkey (Morgül, 2008). Although the EU accession process has led to changes, and some related reform packages were due, their implementations in Turkey are far from meeting international standards. The new adjustment laws required the opening of new language teaching schools or courses for teaching these languages, but they did not explicitly protect the language rights of minorities; rather, this role was left to regulations that would be adopted by the Ministry of National Education (Kaya, 2009). These restrictions prevented the teaching of languages to children at a young age. That is, only students who have graduated from primary or secondary schools, or those that have abandoned these schools and adults can enrol in these courses. This designation amounts to the exclusion of children up to the age of 14 who are not enrolled at any school. Accordingly, those children – such as Kurds, Roma, Assyrians, Laz and other Caucasians, whose native language is not Turkish – do not receive any formal additional support in their mother tongue as yet. Many of these children are often among those who receive the least cognitive stimulation at home and are therefore least well prepared for school life. The danger is that this situation may lead to a disadvantage as being stigmatised for language disorder (Ayan-Ceyhan and Koçbaş, 2009). Information about the language development of children with varied language backgrounds is essential to interpret the performance of these children in school and to assess their development. It has been asserted that children with limited language proficiency are certain to experience increased difficulty in coping both academically and socially, and it is important to identify these difficulties in order to understand what intervention or remedial approaches are needed. Learning a Minority Mother Tongue: The Case of Kurdish–Turkish Bilinguals Kurdish children have to acquire a high level of competency in Turkish in order to receive an education and survive in the community (Polat, 2007). Although the demographic data are not clear enough to indicate to what extent Kurdish people are bilingual in Kurdish and Turkish, most Kurdish children living in particular regions in Turkey learn Kurdish as their mother tongue. Compared with studies in Turkish as L1, little is known about the language development of these children (Topbaş, 2006, 2007, 2011). Kurdish children generally learn Kurdish at home and begin learning Turkish as their second language (L2) via the media at home, in the community and/or at school (Yıldız and Düzgören, 2007; Derince, 2010). Currently, there are vast regional disparities, where the lowest enrolment rates in pre-primary and primary education are observed in the
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south-eastern and eastern Anatolian provinces. Those children whose mother tongue is not Turkish do not receive necessary formal (both nursery and primary) additional support in either language. It can be inferred that these Kurdish–Turkish-speaking children do not fully fit the definition of either simultaneous or sequential bilinguals as they may lack proficiency in both languages. Most Kurdish children start school with little competence in Turkish. Because Kurdish is not allowed as the medium of instruction in primary schools, a mismatch occurs between the language spoken at home and the medium of instruction at school. That is, in the school context, children have to learn literacy skills and instructional content in science, mathematics, history and other courses in Turkish that are too demanding for the children to cope with; and as a result this may lead to comprehension problems in reading and writing, and academic learning difficulties in L2 (i.e. Turkish). In most cases, such children’s Kurdish language proficiency is assumed to be higher than their Turkish skills. Given the low proficiency levels in Turkish, most children encounter problems at school due to not understanding their teachers’ instruction at school. The situation is similar in European countries where Turkish is widespread (e.g. France: Akıncı and Decool-Mercier, 2010; The Netherlands: De Jong, Çavuş, and Baker, 2010; Yağmur and Nap-Kolhoff, 2010; Germany: Chilla and Babur, 2010; England: Marinis and Özge, 2010). Because the submersion education model is the dominant approach in those countries, there is no specialised assistance to facilitate L1 acquisition, which leads to further delays in the socio-emotional and cognitive development of children. On the basis of small vocabulary and incomplete grammar, such children are mostly identified as linguistically impaired, and even worse, as mentally underdeveloped. Given their very low levels of L2 mastery, such children are slow in language production and in most cases they have expressive difficulties in both their first and second languages (Yağmur and Nap-Kolhoff, 2010). Likewise, in the southeastern region of Turkey, where the majority of students are Kurdish, many are listed as underachieving on all the national exams, which are administered in Turkish by the Ministry of Education on an annual basis. Many students drop out of school (cf. Ayan-Ceyhan and Koçbaş, 2009). Both teachers and families attribute this underachievement to the children’s low level of proficiency in the Turkish language because most children speak Kurdish at home. Instead of questioning the role of a subtractive environment and submersion education on children’s first and second language development, teachers blame the children’s first language use as an obstacle to L2 acquisition. However, it may be that sudden shifts into an unfamiliar language and not having access to primary schooling in a familiar language – and/or not having access to sufficient L2 before schooling – are leading to the exclusion of large numbers of children from education, particularly when they face other barriers to education, such as poverty, hunger and poor learning conditions. Even though they have normal cognitive skills, some children with delayed language skills are identified as having language impairment, and as a result are sent to special education schools (Topbaş, 2006; Derince, 2010; ERG, 2010). Many teachers recommend that families should not speak Kurdish at home. Many families agree; however, they do not speak Turkish fluently. Additionally, most teachers in Turkey do not speak Kurdish so they cannot use Kurdish to support children’s learning at school. Aksu-Koç, Erguvanlı-Taylan, and Bekman’s (2002) study, carried _ out in three provinces (Istanbul, Diyarbakır and Van) with 5–6-year-olds and first and second graders, showed that in Istanbul, students who spoke a first language other than Turkish were mainly Kurdish, Bulgarian, Albanian and Circassian, whereas the highest proportions of bilingual speakers, mainly Kurdish–Turkish, were found in Diyarbakır,
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followed by Van. The teachers stated that these children’s linguistic skills in Turkish were very low. Additionally, the fact that these provinces have the highest proportion of uneducated mothers and the least accessible early childhood education services constitute some of the factors that contribute negatively to the level of linguistic development of children (Aksu-Koç et al., 2002), perhaps in both languages. Consequently, this may result in subtractive bilingualism or monolingualism that may be characterised as having less than native-like proficiency in one or both languages (Derince, 2010). Ayan-Ceyhan and Koçbaş (2009) suggested that one of the main reasons for underachievement among the Kurdish-speaking students may be the fact that their L1 (i.e. Kurdish) is disregarded in school settings. Hence, the switch in home–school language in submersion programmes may lead to poor academic achievement and an inadequate command of both the L1 and L2. Language Analysis A brief example of a Kurdish–Turkish bilingual child’s (Yunus, 3:4 years of age) and his mother’s speech is presented here to show the importance of analysing bilingual children’s language use in both languages. The family lives in a suburb of Eskişehir where the socioeconomic level is low, and mainly Kurdish migrants were settled. The family had migrated from Van, in eastern Turkey, 3 months previously. The father is a construction worker. The mother mainly speaks Kurdish and is not proficient in Turkish. Yunus has an older sister (6:0 years). According to the mother, Yunus seemed developmentally appropriate in Kurdish1 (L1) when compared with the target adult patterns, but his skills in Turkish2 (L2) were lower than would be expected for typically developing children. In Yunus’s language output, Kurdish interference can easily be observed; that is, there was some transfer from L1 into L2. However, as stated above, the mother’s L2 was limited. She usually used inverted sentences and some forms were ungrammatical. It is worth looking at some examples from the mother’s and Yunus’s speech below: (1)
Mother:
Cami dir? Mosque DIR.COP (in intonational question form) (Turkish: Cami mi-dir?) Mosque QmI-DIR.COP English gloss: ‘Is this a mosque?’ As in example (1) she did not use -mI in questions. (2) Mother: O kevrişk-i gör-me-miş-tir. He rabbit-ACC see-NEG-PAST-3S ‘He has not seen a rabbit.’ In this example she code-mixes and adds a Turkish suffix to the Kurdish word. (3) Mother: Niye yatak deme miş-iz? Why bed say QmI-3PL ‘Why didn’t we say bed?’ Nevin de biz di-yor. (Turkish: Biz nevin de di-yor-uz.) bed too we say-3SG we bed too say-PROG-3PL ‘We say bed too.’ In the second utterance of this example she changes the word order, and there is no subject– verb agreement. Helin, her daughter, then tries to correct her mother as in (4). Helin also
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inverts the sentence, but her subject–verb agreement is correct. The mother then continues but still uses unacceptable forms of Turkish as in examples (5) and (6).
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(4)
Helin:
Biz gayle di-yor-uz o-na. (Turkish: Biz o-na gayle di-yor-uz.) we bed say-PROG-3P it-DAT we that-DAT bed say-PROG-3PL ‘We say bed to it.’ (5) Mother: Biz di-yor bu-na nevin. (Turkish: Biz bu-na nevin di-yor-uz.) We say-PROG this-DAT bed we this-DAT bed say-PROG-3PL ‘We say bed to this.’ Gayle di-yor-uz biz, çocuk yatağ-ı. bed say-PROG-3PL we, child bed-POSS (Turkish: Biz çocuk yatağına gayle di-yor-uz.) we child bed-POSS-DAT bed say-PROG-3PL ‘We say gayle to a child bed.’ Biz di-yor gayle. (Turkish: Biz gayle di-yor-uz.) We say-PROG bed we bed say-PROG-3PL ‘We say child bed.’ (6) Mother: Der benim kulağım. (he) say my-POSS ear-GEN (Turkish: Ben-im kulağ-ım di-yebil-ir.) my-POSS ear-GEN say-MOD-3S ‘He can say my ear.’ (7) Yunus: Kipat-ı min-e (Turkish: Ben-im kitab-ım) Book-ACC mine My-GEN book-GEN ‘It’s my book.’ (8) Yunus: Yılan-a min-e. (Turkish: Yılan bana vur-acak.) Snake-DAT to me snake me-DAT hit-FUT ‘Snake will hit me.’ (9) Yunus: Şort-e bebig-e var. short-pant-DAT baby-DAT have (Turkish: Bebeğ-in şort-u var.) baby-POSS short pant-GEN have ‘The baby has a short pant.’ (10) Yunus: Deve mine var. (Turkish: Ben-im deve-m var.) camel my have My-GEN deve-GEN have ‘I have a camel.’ Yunus’s vocabulary seemed developmentally appropriate, but he usually named the pictures in L1 as he was more proficient in Kurdish. His grammatical skills resembled his mother’s use of language, in that he also used inverted sentences as in (9). He omitted some suffixes as in (7) and (10), incorrectly added Turkish suffixes either to the Kurdish words or Turkish words and added Kurdish suffixes to Turkish words as in (8) and (9). A person who is not a speech and language pathologist (SLP) may interpret such differences as a disorder. However, an SLP may analyse the speech samples to differentiate whether the differences stem from a delay or a processing deficit or something else. The SLP knows that language delay and specific language impairment are developmental disorders and that language delay due to bilingualism does not follow the same course of development. Thus, he/she can consider the parents’ level of language proficiency as well to foster good versus
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poor language proficiency in a child and can recommend to parents to communicate with their children in their most proficient language.
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Conclusions and Implications for Children with Language Impairments Many minority bilingual children, as outlined above, are among those who are least well prepared for school life where the language of instruction is Turkish. Developing bilinguals, when compared with monolinguals, may show evidence of different linguistic representations and/or difficulties related to the amount of exposure to each language. It is also likely that they may experience increased difficulty in coping both academically and socially. The danger is that this situation may lead to disadvantage, and stigmatisation due to a diagnosis of language impairment. The language characteristics may superficially resemble children with specific language impairments and it is often difficult to differentiate language impairments at the early phases of sequential bilingualism due to the reduced amount of both languages. For example, grammatical skills are impaired in children with specific language impairments, but there is no genuine impairment in bilingual children, although their language skills may not be age appropriate as compared with monolingual children. As seen in the examples above, bilingual children may mix their two languages together in one sentence, and they may be more proficient in one of their languages than the other in terms of their vocabulary and grammar. According to Paradis (2010), the language they are more proficient in is usually the language they speak and hear the most; they code-mix or code-switch at times, but this is not a sign of language disorder. Information about the speech and language development of children with varied language backgrounds is essential for SLP services to interpret the performance of these children and to assess their development. Moreover, it is important to assess both languages in order to understand whether difficulties stem from a lack of exposure to either language or are specific to impairment and if so, what intervention or remedial approaches are needed. Currently, there are no tools to assess speech and language performance of Kurdish children, as well as those children whose L1 is not Turkish (Topbaş, 2011). As shown in this short review, an SLP can analyse the differences and similarities from the speech samples in the two languages and can demonstrate whether the differences are due to impairment. Additionally, there is a need for interpreters/translators in children’s first languages. Hence, another important contribution may be to conduct research in the acquisition of L1 and bilingual minority groups at the early phases and compare the performances and develop tests to assess children’s performance in both languages for intervention purposes. It should be noted that it may take longer for bilinguals than monolinguals to perfect the finer points of their languages. Given enough time and exposure, they will eventually catch up in their less proficient language. Recent research, using more reliable methodology, has shown that development in the first language has positive effects on the second language and that both languages nurture each other when the educational environment permits children access to both languages (Cummins, 2000). Derince (2010) showed that learning L1 (Kurdish) is in no way an obstacle to school success; on the contrary, enhancing L1 language development before and during schooling is an essential predictor of higher proficiency in L2 (Turkish), as well as L3 (English). Derince further suggests that Kurdish-speaking parents should not refrain from speaking Kurdish to their children; on the contrary they need to explicitly enforce the mother tongue development of their children for a more effective multilingualism to occur. As Cummins (2000) proposed, bi/multilingual education programmes that take the role of mother tongue as a central part of the education process are generally the best means of achieving long-term school success of bi/multilingual minority students and for attaining
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language development both in the L1 and in subsequently learned languages (cf. Derince, 2010). Thus, educational policies should encourage development of the mother tongue and bi/multilingualism, and support those organisations, such as The Mother Child Education Foundation (ACEV) of Turkey, that have taken a serious interest in contributing to the improvement of social and linguistic development of children in eastern and south-eastern Turkey (Bekman, Aksu-Koç, and Erguvanlı-Taylan, 2004). SLPs and other educators may provide services to enrich speech, language, reading and writing skills for children who are at risk for poor academic performance. To strengthen diversity, respect and equality among citizens, additional initiatives and funding should be given to schools and teachers in regions where the most disadvantaged are concentrated. Such funding will enable the development of special projects and programmes to increase access to education, to prepare children for school, and for remediation if necessary. Awareness campaigns may be conducted to inform the public that growing up bilingually does not lead to language impairments. While the use of the societal majority language in the home is inevitable to some extent, it is typically better for families to use their native language at home. Acknowledgement The author is grateful to the family for their insights during sampling and to Dilber Kaçar, M. Sc. student at the Department of Speech and Language Therapy, Anadolu University, for collecting and transcribing the speech sample and to Dr. Özcan Karaaslan for support as the Kurdish–Turkish translator. Declaration of interest: The author reports no conflicts of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of the paper. Notes 1. Turkish, belonging to the Altaic linguistic family, is an agglutinating language. The neutral word order is subject– object–verb (SOV) (Göksel and Kerslake, 2005). 2. Kurdish belongs to the Indo-European family. It is an inflecting language with morphological ergativity. The morphology is rich but not agglutinative. The canonical word order is SOV but shows variations (Aygen, 2007).
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