A case study about the 3rd generation of Turkish society in West Europe: The case of Netherlands

Western European countries needed labor to restructure their destroyed countries after World War II and ensure their economic development, so they started to receive immigration from other countries. As a result, migrants with different cultures and identities have come to European countries to work and have created a multicultural society. For the same reason, the Turks who passed the health check in the 1960s started to come to the Netherlands for a few years to work. As in the country with the 1970 law on family reunification and children earn money in the short-term aim of bringing the sides to return to Turkey. Turkey has become a long-term placement. Thus, the Netherlands created the first generation of Turkish society. As for the Turkish children who were born and raised in the Netherlands, they generally married from their country and brought their wives or husbands to the Netherlands or other Western European countries. We call this group the second generation Turks. The second generation felt the need to participate in society more than the first generation but faced various difficulties in adaptation. They supported the school and language success of the country in which their children lived in order to have a good place and profession in the society and they were inadequate in their own mother tongue and cultural transfer. The third generation of the Dutch community is Born and raised in the Netherlands.They are more influenced by the Dutch language and culture, where they live, but they are frustrated by speaking only in their families and their environment. Since they did not receive education in their mother tongue at school, they could not use their mother tongue according to their age level and were left behind in their reading and writing skills. The young people speak Turkish with their mother tongue among themselves, but instead of the words that they cannot know or cannot think of at the moment, they have created a mixed language by putting Dutch words. The 3rd generation native Dutch speaker feels the need to speak and develop Turkish and is looking forward to a possible Turkish education. But they are in search of how and in what way this will happen. This study briefly gives information about the development and change process in the Netherlands since the first immigration of Turks to the Netherlands. The research was conducted in accordance with the qualitative research method due to its scope and content. Open-ended questions were asked to determine the native language skills of the participants. Interview records, which constitute the qualitative data of the study, were analyzed using categorical analysis, one of the content analysis types. The study group of the research consists of eleven participants, seven of them are girls and four of them are boys. As a result of the study, it was observed that the participants spoke Turkish with the accent of the region where their families came from and their vocabulary was limited. Although the first language that the participants learned was Turkish, it was found that they were able to improve their Turkish less because they mostly speak Dutch, which is the official language of the country, in their environment, in the kindergarten and school environment. Keywords: Immigration, Mother tongue, Second language