Orientations to the Host Country

Chapter 4 focuses on future oriented chronotopes of the host country and analyzes a number of social concerns related to these possible futures, as participants discuss their ideals and uncertainties. Focusing first on the case of Iranian educational migrants, the chapter explains the bureaucratic restrictions surrounding Iranian migration to the United States. It then focuses on discourses from a group of Iranian Azerbaijani friends who are discussing their anxieties about their financial and migration statuses in relation to their multiple chronotopic understandings of the host country. The attention then shifts to Uzbek migrants, and the issues of heritage language maintenance and participation in diasporic community activities. Drawing from different types of data (e.g., interviews and social media posts), the authors highlight the moral aspect of participants’ imagined future chronotopes of life in the host country, and the ways that this spatiotemporal morality shapes their language ideological orientations in general, as well as their family language planning in particular.