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The current study aims to provide an understanding of how the relationships between standard and non-standard varieties of the Turkish language are perceived by young people of Turkish Cypriot descent within the context of Turkish complementary schools in London. These schools are set up by diasporic communities to fight/reverse language shift and loss. They are also political spaces where cultural and linguistic practices are legitimised and delegitimized to help create an imagined community. Hence they provide rich contexts to investigate young people’s perceptions of standard and non-standard varieties of languages. This study specifically draws on interview data of eight UK-born Turkish Cypriot young people, collected through a 13-month ethnographic study in a London-based Turkish complementary school. The results of the thematic analysis of the participants’ discourses showed that the participants thought that the role of the Turkish school was to teach the ‘proper’ variety, i.e. standard Turkish. Through the lens of Bourdieu’s capitals, the results indicated that the participants believed that acquiring this variety would make them become more ‘educated.’ However, some participants problematised the seemingly straightforward association between standard varieties and positive perceptions of their speakers, which raises important questions about rethinking the position of non-standard varieties in education.
