Losers in the Language Gap

For Deniz Yigitoglu, Mark Twain's story 'The Awful German Language' would be of painful significance. Although the pretty 16-year-old daughter of Turkish migrants has spent most of her life in Germany — her parents moved to the industrial city of Duisburg when she was three — she speaks heavily accented German, which she admits is "quite faulty."

Yigitoglu is one of many young migrants for whom the Teuton tongue is a truly foreign language. "Most third-generation Turks in Germany do not have a sufficient knowledge of German even though most of them have been born and raised here,"...