«Kanak sprak. The Linguistic Features of Turkish Migrants’ Communicative Style in Feridun Zaimoğlu’s Works»

Inspired by Ruqaiya Hasan's conviction that "in verbal art the role of language is central. Here language is not clothing to the body; it is the body", the papers are on a variety of aspects of the language-literature connection, and approach it from diverse perspectives and methodological frameworks, including Systemic Functional Linguistics, pragmatics, corpus linguistics, ethnolinguistics, cultural and translation studies. A range of literary genres and world literatures are analysed, including Shakespeare's plays; modern Austrian authors writing in German (e.g., Thomas Bernhard); Perrault's Histoires et contes du temps passé and their translations by angela Carter; the Spanish poets of the Generacion del '50; Malaysian-Singaporean poets in English; Anglo-American Modernist poets (Frost, Stevens, Pound and Lawrence) and novelists (Woolf and Conrad); a short story by Marina Warner and Turkish-German narrative by Feridun Zamoglu; The Gospel of St.John and Harry Potter. My article provides a linguistic analysis of the novels of German-Turkish writer Feridun Zaimoglu. His fictional writings challenge the traditional boundaries between documentary and fictional genres and are the result of several years of research on multiethnic migrants’ communities. The critical approach to Zaimoglu’s novels is firmly grounded in a socio-linguistic perspective. According to such critical perspectives, the linguistic behavior of young migrants is closely connected with questions of identity in a social dimension, and has the function of representing a particular social situation. It focuses on an illustration of the linguistic features of the Kanake language (kanak sprak) as it is enacted in Zaimoglu’s works, paying particular attention to this language’s phonetic and prosodic elements, graphostylistic aspects, features of orality and phenomena of code-mixing and code-switching from the German language. Besides describing this new variety of German, this detailed analysis serves to explain the way in which the Kanaken articulate their social and political condition. For exmaple, I point out, from the lexical point of view, the kanak sprach is rich in neologistic compound nouns and phenomena of re-lexicalisation which can be interpreted as the expression of a self-conscious social-cultural identity that strives to distance itself from that of a standard German, as well as from those of other communities of migrants. It is something new, and ‘other’. The article confronts intricate and highly contemporary matters which link plurilinguistic concerns with the social conditions of the immigrant and his/her identity, as well as cultural diversity and intercultural relations.