Turkish-German bilinguals and their intonation: Triangulating evidence about contact-induced language change

In this article, I focus on the intonation patterns of Turkish-German bilinguals to discuss intonation within the context of language contact and language variation. The intonational variance involves the realization of terminal rises as produced by second- and third-generation Turkish-German bilinguals living in Germany. These speakers produce two phonetically, phonologically, and pragmatically distinct rises, which differ from what is typically reported for German monolinguals. The primary phonetic differences between the two rises include the relative alignment and slope of the rise, with one rise aligning on the final syllable of the word regardless of the stress pattern and showing a significantly steeper slope than the other. Although the source of these two rises is likely the two languages used by the speakers, this is not a case of intonational code-switching. Rather, the two rises, along with other edge phenomena, form an intonational system in which the rises are in contrast with one another as well as with falls and level edge contours and as such play different pragmatic roles relative to one another.