Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Duisburg-Essen (Anglistisches Institut), course: Pidgins& Creoles, language: English, abstract: [...] Their children, the (so-called) second generation who were mostlyborn in Germany had a not so fundamentally different relationship to Germany which isactually supposed to be their home country. There are, however, some vast differencesbetween these generations, especially in terms of their German language proficiency. Most ofthe second (or third/fourth) generation of Gastarbeiter today are bilingual speakers, generallymore fluent in German than in the respective language of their parents. Of course, thesegenerations share more distinctive features than sole linguistic ones: the majority of theguest workers children are, in full contrast to their parents, in many ways integrated intoGerman society and do have a much closer relationship to Germany as a whole. Whereasmost Germans are monolingual, speaking some (more or less acceptable) English or Frenchor Italian etc., the Germans (!) with foreign descent have two languages at their disposal whether they succeed in both languages (or in either of them!) is, of course, another question,many of which, however, can be tackled using a socio-linguistic approach. For the purpose of this paper I shall focus on some linguistic phenomena ofGastarbeiterdeutsch, not only referring to the (highly restricted) German language proficiencyof the first generation of Turkish guest workers (circa 1960-1975) but also on their offspring(circa 1975-). Since I am of Turkish descent myself my father, a guest worker himself, hadhis first shift in a German coal-mine in August 1965- I have been (and still am) dealing veryclosely with the language-related particularities (and oddities) of a Turkish dominatedparents house somewhere in North Rhine-Westphalia. In order to explain these, to my mind,one has to investigate profoundly the linguistic equipment of the respective speakersalongside with their social whereabouts and the country they immigrate to and where theylive, especially the linguistic challenges they have to face. For this purpose, a comparativeanalysis of Turkish and German is indispensable. Since it goes without saying that anelaboration on all of these aspects would undoubtedly go beyond the scope of this paper, Ishall concentrate on the language equipment of the first generation Turks and their children,specifically on code-switching phenomena. What is required in the first place, I think, is anoverall outline of both Turkish and German, especially of Turkish.