Deniz Tat is an Assistant Professor in Turkish Language and Culture. She received a PhD in Linguistics with a minor in Cognitive Science from the University of Arizona (2013). She specializes in Turkish syntax and morphology, Turkish–Dutch language contact, heritage bilingualism, and language ideology.

More information about Deniz Tat

Fields of interest

Theoretical linguistics, bilingualism, language acquisition, contact linguistics, language ideology, Turkey, language pedagogy.

Research and curriculum vitae

I subsequently served as an Assistant Professor at Yeditepe University before joining Leiden University in 2015. At Leiden, I have developed Turkish language courses across multiple levels and have taught thesis seminars in the BA International Studies programme in The Hague. As of 2026–2027, I am scheduled to teach introductory Ottoman Turkish and comparative literature (Turkish component). I supervise BA and MA theses that integrate linguistic approaches with questions of migration, identity, discourse, and cultural heritage.

I am the co-founder of the HerLing (Heritage Linguistics) Lab, a nationally and internationally visible platform dedicated to the study of heritage languages in the Netherlands. Through HerLing, I engage in comparative perspectives on heritage bilingualism within Dutch society. The Lab also provides research internships and organizes annual public events.

I am the recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship under the EU Horizon 2020 programme (±€214,000), hosted by UiT The Arctic University of Norway, for my research on Turkish heritage language use in the Netherlands. During my fellowship period, I was also a member of Aurora Outstanding, a cross-disciplinary talent programme for promising early-career researchers.

I am currently completing a Turkish coursebook, Tarihin Eşiğinde Türkçe (Turkish at the Threshold of History, under contract with LUP). The book adopts a content-based, historically grounded, and linguistically explicit approach that integrates language instruction with the intellectual and social transformations—and debates—of the early Republican era (1923–1945).

Current Publications in Progress
• Karimi, S., Mahdavi, M., & Tat, D. (under review). Scope ambiguity of focus-sensitive clitics in Persian and Turkish.
• Tat, Deniz & Rothman, Jason (manuscript). Do Dutch Middles Leak into Turkish under Language Contact? Evidence from a Heritage Speaker Acceptability Judgment Task.
• Tat, Deniz & Rothman, Jason (in preparation). Structure-Driven Case in Mixed Turkish–Dutch Verbal Predicates.
• Tat, Deniz (in preparation). Seven Considerations for Teaching Turkish as a Historically-Grounded Area Studies Language.
• Tat, Deniz (in preparation). Inheriting Enslaved People Across Imperial Distance: Muhacirin Slavery, Mobility, and Ottoman Administration.

Additional Collaborative Work
I represent Leiden University in a pending Erasmus+ project (total budget €250,000) in collaboration with the Université de Rouen Normandie, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and Middle East Technical University. The project aims to develop an evidence-based bilingual curriculum for Turkish-origin children aged 3–6 in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, addressing the structural marginalization of immigrant languages in European education systems.

I am also preparing a project proposal on the heritage language outcomes of a Western Anatolian Turkish dialect community (Emirdağ) in Ghent, Brussels, Haarlem, and The Hague, examining how different linguistic contexts (Dutch vs. French) and socio-political settings (Belgium vs. the Netherlands) shape these outcomes.

Selected publications

• Tat, D. (2023). “Citizen, Speak Turkish!”: A Jewish Appeal for Turkification. In A Hundred Years of Republican Turkey: A History in a Hundred Fragments. 
• Rothman, J., Bayram, F., DeLuca, V., Di Pisa, G., Duñabeitia, J., Gharibi, K., … Tat, D. (2023). Monolingual comparative normativity in bilingualism research is out of “control”: Arguments and alternatives. Applied Psycholinguistics, 44(3), 316–329. 
• Tat, D. (2022). Lexical Borrowing Targets Spans. Languages, 7(4), 289. 
• Tat, D. & Kornfilt, J. (2022). Partial versus full agreement in Turkish possessive and clausal DP coordination. In Pseudo-Coordination and Multiple Agreement Constructions, pp. 271–286. 
• Van Osch, B., Boers, I., Grijzenhout, J., Parafita Couto, M.C., Sterken, B., & Tat, D. (2022). Cross linguistic influence in bilingual grammars. In The Acquisition of Gender, pp. 209–242.

Publications