“I mean, I like English even better than Turkish”: English-speaking German-Turkish Students as Multilingual Transnationals

Abstract

Focusing on a group of multilingual German-Turkish students enrolled at an urban high-school in Berlin,this paper inquires how ELF identities and transnational experiences inform each other. Semistructured, audio-recorded interviews conducted as part of a larger project (Erduyan, 2019) are analyzedthrough microethnographic lenses informed by a scalar approach. Following Lam (2009) and Maloney &De Costa (2017) the analyses focus on the local, translocal, and transnational scales that permeatestudents’ narratives. Findings suggest that being ELF users/speakers help Turkish students fill in a gapthat they perceive they cannot fill in by being Turkish or German speakers alone, that of beingcosmopolitan, global citizens with transnational experience. Findings also suggest the changingmeanings of homeland for Turkish students —from the traditional, monolingual, provincial Turkey to amore urban, cosmopolitan Turkey. The inevitable implications of these changes for identity constructionare discussed further in the article.© 2019 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-accessarticle distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND)(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).