Turkish as a heritage language: Diachronic change and synchronic variation of Turkish in the United Kingdom

In this study, I investigate certain morpho-syntactic changes emerging in Turkish spoken as a heritage language in the United Kingdom. I mainly focus on object pronoun use and the use of the plural marker -lAr both on verbs and nouns in this variety, based on data collected from members of the Turkish community in the United Kingdom. First, I show that Turkish heritage speakers tend not to omit direct objects even in environments in which they are judged redundant or optional by the baseline speakers, native speakers of Turkish in Turkey. Second, I reveal that heritage speakers of Turkish prefer plural marking on nouns even when the latter are modified by quantifiers and numerals - configurations that are judged in the literature as ungrammatical in Standard Modern Turkish. Third, I present that the same speakers use -lAr as third person plural marker in their natural speech more than the baseline speakers, overriding certain strong tendencies in Standard Modern Turkish, such as a tendency to omit -lAr when the controller is a nonhuman or inanimate plural subject. I claim that these differences cannot be wholesale attributed to one or the other mechanisms of change. Instead, I argue that there are different motivating factors for these changes, which are mainly the dominant language transfer effect, silence and distance problems in binding, complex structure avoidance, and the tendency to adopt a more regularized and analytic structure.