Multilingual practices and identity negotiations among Turkish-speaking young people in a diasporic context

In this paper, we explore a group of Turkish-speaking young Londoners’ multilingual practices and identity negotiations in a diasporic context, two Turkish complementary schools. The paper draws upon field-notes and digital recordings to investigate how the young people in question contextually select code-switching, the use of intertextual references and playful talk as linguistic resources to craft identity options for themselves and others during Turkish literacy teaching. We explore the Turkish-speaking young people’s multilingual practices in the context of the traditional Initiation-Response-Feedback (henceforth IRF) sequence. We suggest that the interactional moments when young people contextually select and juxtapose these linguistic resources for work, play and social affiliation or disaffiliation can provide us with useful insights into youngspeak in diasporic institutional contexts.