German: Slang of Migrants
The era of globalization in today's world is characterized by both increased international relations and the increasing number of contacts between people who belong to different ethnic and social communities. Growing migration flows, contributing to intensive cross-cultural interaction, have led to a new version of the German language in Germany. This article is devoted to the study of one of such ethnic sociolects of the German language «Kanakisch», which is used for communication by migrants of Turkish origin, examines the social backgrounds for the emergence of this linguistic formation, as well as illustrates the linguistic features of this language used by a certain social group (sociolect). The article focuses on the morphosyntactic, phonetic and lexical structures of the studied language variant. Being a special combination of the native (Turkish) language, profanity and lexemes borrowed from the German language, Kanakisch serves to satisfy the communicative needs of a limited social group. The paper provides a number of examples illustrating this mixture of German and Turkish. It is noted that Kanakisch acts as a means of communicative and linguistic self-identification in a certain ethnic group; it should not be considered as «spoiled» German.