Turkish language use of English people living in Fethiye and their attitudes towards Turkish

In recent years, people from different countries have migrated to Turkey. They started to learn Turkish in order to get by which in turn has increased the number of bilinguals in Turkey. Langugae use and bilingualism have been studied in many respects in the USA, Canada and Germany. However, the number of studies on language use and bilingualism in Turkey is very few when compared to these countries. After 2000, many English people started to live in Fethiye for different reasons. Those people began to learn Turkish which resulted in the appearance of adult English-Turkish bilinguals in society. In this thesis, Turkish language use of adult bilinguals and their attitudes towards Turkish have been studied. Beforehand, 15 participants who were believed to serve the purpose of the study were determined and then they were interviewed. In the interviews, those participants were asked questions about their approaches and attitudes towards Turkish. Interviews were recorded with a tape recorder and then they were transcribed. In this descriptive study, by taking the socio-linguistic variables into consideration it is aimed to identify grammatical deviations of adult English bilinguals from standard Turkish, determine their approaches and attitudes towards Turkish and find out how the gathered data can serve to teaching of Turkish as a foreign language. As a result of the analysis, it was found out that the participants made phonological,morphological, lexical and syntactic copies from English.