Turkish, Bulgarian and German language mixing among Bulgarian Muslim Roma in Germany

Abstract

The paper discusses language mixing by Muslim Roma migrants from northeastern Bulgaria living in Berlin, Germany. They identify as Turks and in their everyday communication speak mainly Bulgarian and an old northwestern lect of Turkish, in the scientific literature known as Balkanized Turkish. They can speak relatively little German and have demonstrably low proficiency in the language. The paper examines their language mixing as well as the forms of code-switching between Turkish, Bulgarian and German. These linguistic and social phenomena within the Muslim Roma community are analyzed within the framework of several sociolinguistic theories regarding code-switching and bilingualism. The theory of J. Gumperz (1962) about communication matrix is employed as a dynamic frame and patterns of Turkish-Bulgarian, Turkish-German and Turkish-Bulgarian-German are presented and analyzed. The borrowed grammatical categories in the Turkish-Bulgarian-German language contacts involve nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and negations. However, code-switching is used only in communication with other Bulgarians. In communication with Turks from Turkey the lexical borrowings are from German and they use another variety of Turkish. The Muslim Roma in Berlin observed in this study are diverse in their multilingualism. Among them there are speakers of Romani, Bulgarian and Turkish, and of Turkish and Bulgarian, while German, however learned, is their third or fourth language. Differing emergent patterns among second-generation migrants, born or raised from an early age in Berlin, suggest different patterns emerging and such research is a key desideratum.