WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch Language ideologies and identities in Kurdish heritage language classrooms in London Yilmaz, B. This is an author's accepted manuscript of an article published in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 253 (86), pp. 173-200, 2018. The final definitive version is available online at: https://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2018-0030 The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the URL of WestminsterResearch: ((http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). In case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail
[email protected] Language ideologies and identities in Kurdish heritage language classrooms in London Abstract This article investigates the way that Kurdish language learners construct discourses around identity in two language schools in London. It focuses on the values that heritage language learners of Kurdish-Kurmanji attribute to the Kurmanji spoken in the Bohtan and Maraş regions of Turkey. Kurmanji is one of the varieties of Kurdish that is spoken mainly in Turkey and Syria. The article explores the way that learners perceive the language from the Bohtan region to be ‘good Kurmanji’, in contrast to the ‘bad Kurmanji’ from the Maraş region. Drawing on ethnographic data collected from community-based Kurdish-Kurmanji heritage language classes for adults in South and East London, I illustrate how distinctive lexical and phonological features such as the sounds [a:] ~ [ɑ:] and [ɑ]/ [æ] ~ [a:] are associated with regional (and religious) identities of the learners.