Although Arabic-Turkish language contact has a long history, Arabic in public discourse in Turkey has never ceased to be a polarized space showcasing language ideologies. The influx of Syrian immigrants due to the war in the last decade and the newly arriving transnational groups of upscale Arabs from the Gulf countries aside, Arabic speakers in Turkey are mainly heritage language speakers based in the southeastern parts of Anatolia. Secluded for a long time due to geography, impoverished economic conditions, and lack of access to mainstream schooling, some of these communities had a very late contact with Turkish. When they started migrating to İstanbul in the 1970s, they went through the typical heritage language trajectory, and showed different patterns in retaining Arabic across generations. This long history also meant identifying with a range of scales that inform their language use (Blommaert, 2010). In this sense, while multilingual performances in public spaces are ordinary linguistic practices in some scales of this fifty-year long history, they can be deemed as innovative given other scales of social and linguistic existence.

In this interview study, we focus on a particular group of heritage speakers of Arabic in Turkey, those who come from the rather historical multilingual city of Mardin on the Syrian border. Reflecting on the life histories of speakers from three generations, we inquire particularly a) What kind of scales inform this particular group’s linguistic performances and how do they differ across three generations? and b) How do these performances relate to the intertwined relationship between Turkish and Arabic? We analyze our findings based on microethnographic analyses of interview narratives and discuss their implications for multilingual performances involving heritage languages.

 Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge University Press.