Standard language ideologies: the case of Cypriot Turkish in Turkish schools in London

Abstract

For diasporic communities, beyond the obvious dichotomy between the home language and the language used by the host community, there lie the complexities of language use and language ideologies related to standard and non-standard versions spoken by the community members. These complexities galvanise various attitudes performed through linguistic as well as behavioural choices. The current study aims to present language ideologies prevalent among adults in Turkish complementary schools in London and young people’s responses to these. Adopting a micro-ethnographic approach, data were collected through participant observations at a Turkish complementary school in London over a period of 13 months. In addition, individual unstructured interviews were conducted with teachers, parents and young people attending the school, and recordings of naturally occurring conversations within the school were made. The results of the analysis indicated that the standard vs. non-standard dichotomy in relation to the Turkish language varieties were built around a discourse of legitimate vs. incorrect/broken language use by the teachers, which was then resisted in various ways by the young people. Young people’s responses to their teachers’ language teaching practices raise alternative discourses around the legitimacy of Standard Turkish and the (de)legitimacy of Cypriot Turkish.