“Turkish is a Stepchild.” A Case Study of Language Policies in North Rhine Westphalia, Germany

Abstract

Research on the language attitudes and ideologies of teachers engaged in Heritage Language Instruction (HLI) in Germany is scarce even though HLI has been implemented in German schools since the early 1970s. Our goal is to fill in a gap in this field of HL pedagogy and focus on teachers’ perspectives related to language policies. We examine the ways that HL teachers’ work is shaped by specific ideological discourses that lead to bias against using HLs in school and prejudices against their speakers. We focus only on Turkish as a HL spoken in Germany, but we present findings from our case study that could theoretically apply to other HLs in Germany. We find that both explicit and more covert discrimination affect teachers’ actions and professional identity as HL teachers and persistently disrupt HLI and communication of teachers and students.