Abstract Today, long‐term effects of migration into Germany are shown most notably in the emergence of linguistic practices of young people, many of them second or third generation migrants, in urban areas. Turkish German describes a way of speaking that first emerged in young people's speech in multi‐ethnic urban areas and was first associated with Turkish adolescents. Later, it became widely known through its appearance in films, comedies and rap songs. In contrast to earlier studies on immigrants' language in Germany (see section ), Turkish German is not associated with imperfect acquisition but with the manner in which speakers actively construct and perform ethnic identities and other social meanings via language. Turkish German is conceptualised either as an ethnolect, or an ethnic style, implying different research traditions with focus on different aspects of linguistic descriptions. Other studies choose the term ‘Kiezdeutsch’ over Turkish German to emphasise the ways of speaking multiethnolectal dimension. It is the aim of this article to present different linguistic approaches to Turkish German, with a critical discussion of some of the key concepts, and to give an overview over its linguistic features and functions on the basis of relevant empirical studies on the linguistic practices among Turkish–German bilinguals.