Implications of bilingual development for specific language impairments in Turkey

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.

• multilingualism
• specific language impairment
• Turkish
• Kurdish

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).