Intergenerational phonological change in the Famagusta dialect of Turkish Cypriots
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İdil Menteşoğlu
Abstract
There have been countless speculations about the phenomenon of languages changing in time from generation to generation. As the age difference between generations increases, changes in the language passed down from the older generation to the younger become much more noticeable. Over time, Cypriot Turkish (i.e., the variety of Turkish used by the Turkish Cypriot community in Northern Cyprus) has been exposed to a variety of internal and external changes through contact with Standard Turkish. The main purpose of this article is to explore the intergenerational phonological shift over apparent time in the city of Famagusta in Northern Cyprus. The focus is on the competition between the traditional non-standard Turkish Cypriot voiced obstruent stop variants [g], [d], and [b] and the Standard Turkish voiceless variants [k], [t], and [p]. The results show sociolinguistic variation depending on age and gender, and point to the possibility of a long-term decline in Cypriot Turkish in favor of Standard Turkish.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- Preface: commemorating the 200th issue of IJSL
- Introduction: aging and language
- Age and speaker skills in receding languages: how far do community evaluations and linguists' evaluations agree?
- Gaelic on the Isle of Skye: older speakers' identity in a language-shift situation
- Language choice and code switching of the elderly and the youth
- Intergenerational phonological change in the Famagusta dialect of Turkish Cypriots
- First language attrition and reversion among older migrants
- Managing unavoidable conflicts in caretaking of the elderly: humor as a mitigating resource
- Beyond stereotypes of old age: the discourse of elderly Japanese women
- The multifaceted category of “generation”: elderly French men and women talking about May '68
- Positioning age: focus group discussions about older people in TV advertising
- Age categories as an argumentative resource in conflict talk: evidence from a Greek television reality show
- The politics of language and nationalism in modern Central Europe, by Tomasz Kamusella
