Turkish: Linguistic and Cultural Considerations for SLPs in Multilingual Contexts Seyhun Topbaş Department of Speech and Language Therapy, Anadolu University Turkey Financial Disclosure: Seyhun Topbaş is a Professor and Faculty of Health Sciences at Anadolu University. Nonfinancial Disclosure: Seyhun Topbaş has no nonfinancial interests related to the content of this article. Abstract Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) around the world are likely to provide clinical services to Turkish speaking people with communication disorders. Most non-Turkish SLPs are not fluent in Turkish as a second language to serve bilingual or minority clients. This paper introduces the reader to basic information about the Turkish language and culture, followed by considerations for clinicians working with Turkish-speaking clients and their families. Turkish Speakers beyond Homeland Turkish is the most widely spoken language in the European Union (EU) by approximately 5 million people, around 4 million of which live in Western European countries. Over 3 million speakers of Turkish live in Germany and other northern European countries, Belgium, France, Denmark, and England. Over a million live in Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Greece (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2012). Turkish also has the largest number of speakers in a family of Turkic languages spoken across Eastern Europe and Asia and is the third most widely spoken language in the Middle East. It is estimated that approximately 150,000 speakers of Turkish live in Australia, Japan, and far-east countries. Turkish is a growing but under-studied United States language. There have been three waves of immigration from Turkey to the United States; at the beginning of the 19th century, after World War II, and in the late 1980s. Since then the number of people with Turkish ancestry in the United States increased to 500,000 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). Today, Turkish Americans live in all fifty states, although the largest concentrations are found in metropolitan areas such as the State of New York, California, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, Virginia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Washington D.C. The percentage of Turkish clients comprising speech-language pathologists’ (SLP) caseloads throughout the world is not known. There is a very limited number of Turkish SLPs who could serve the Turkish community for any communication disorders. Thus, a large number of Turkish individuals with communication disorders will receive SLP services from a non-Turkish speaking SLP. This could create challenges in the assessment and the treatment of the individual. In the United States or most EU countries, Turkish immigrants, who are mostly from rural areas of Turkey, might carry the risk of being under-referred for speech and language disorders (SLD) in their second language (L2). Usually, the criterion of limited communicative competence in both languages is used for determining the presence of a language disorder. In grammatical evaluations, a norm-referenced evaluation is also necessary (Bi-SLi, n.d.). Personal contacts with SLP colleagues in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark emphasize the need of an evaluation in the first language specifically in children with language impairments (LI/SLI) with unknown aetiologies and in aphasia assessment and therapies. 96 Downloaded From: http://sig14perspectives.pubs.asha.org/ by Anadolu Univ. Kutuphane Ve, Seyhun Topbas on 12/31/2014 Terms of Use: http://pubs.asha.org/ss/Rights_and_Permissions.aspx