A Variety of Turkish in Mid-south Turkey: Arabic-Turkish Inter-language

Abstract

Studies on inter-language in the second language acquisition field have been of paramount importance in recent years. In line with such studies, thus with this study we aim to show oral production samples of adult Arabic speakers of Turkish (N=10) through elicited data in natural conversation settings, and to analyze the data morphosyntactically and lexically based on the inter-language hypothesis. Analysis of the gathered data indicates that the participants produced the target language quite competently and fluently by showing morphosyntactic and lexical variations in their output. The results obtained from intralingual communication, where only Arabic speakers are involved, suggest that the variety in question displays relative variations from the standard dialect in two domains mentioned above. Findings concerning Arabic and non-Arabic speakers present a rather different picture in that the variety gets much closer to the standard Turkey Turkish, and tend to support literature review emphasizing the importance of inter-language variation from socio-ecological and socio-cultural viewpoints. The study implies that second language acquisition might be attained in adulthood.