Contact Phenomena in Gostivar Turkish (Macedonia)

© Şirin Tufan

Gostivar Turkish (henceforth GT) is spoken in Gostivar, a town in the western part of the Republic of Macedonia (henceforth RM). It is a Turkic language, a direct descendent of Ottoman Turkish in mutually comprehensibility with Standard Turkish, and indeed Anatolian Turkish. It is the mother tongue of the ethnic Turks living in Gostivar, the first language of many Roma, and also spoken by many Albanians, Torbeshi and Macedonians as a second or third language.