Standardisation of the Cypriot Turkish obstruent stops

This dissertation attempts to verify that there is a certain phonetic standardization in the speech of young generation Turkish Cypriots. The investigation accomplished in this thesis considers three obstruent stops (k), (t) and (p) as the linguistic variables in Cypriot Turkish. There appears to be a phonologic contrast regarding these variables between Cypriot Turkish dialect and Standard Turkish. In other words, [k], [t] and [p] variants in Standard Turkish is observed to be [g], [d] and [b] respectively in Cypriot Turkish in some contexts. Recent studies have shown that this variation is more common in old generations, whereas younger generations have a tendency to use the standard forms more than older generations in their speech. The reasons for this phonetic divergence between two generations can be assumed as the increasing exposure of standard variety via education, technology, communication and media. The research is a descriptive linguistics study under the guidance of sociolinguistics, in that it takes place in a social context and carried out on dynamic dependent and independent variables (e.g. gender, education, and age).