Braiding Qurʾānic, colloquial and Turkish literacies: investment, translanguaging and heritage-language identity in Syrian refugee tutoring in Türkiye

For Syrian refugee children resettled in Türkiye, Arabic exists in three overlapping repertoires: colloquial Arabic for home, Qurʾānic fuṣḥā for sacred practice, and Turkish for schooling and mobility. This study integrates investment theory, translanguaging, and heritage literacy to examine how sacred, colloquial, and host-language literacies are braided through private tutoring. Fifteen semi-structured interviews with four child–parent–tutor triads in Gaziantep were coded using a 22-item analytic framework combining these perspectives. Using R-based co-occurrence mapping and network analysis, 535 coded excerpts were analysed to trace how participants negotiate Arabic’s dual role as both sacred heritage and practical resource. Findings reveal asymmetric yet complementary investments across stakeholders. Parents prioritise faith and home-based translanguaging as moral continuity; children foreground schooling motives and perceived difficulty; tutors actively bridge Qurʾānic and academic literacies. Network centrality analysis identifies two key bridges, home translanguaging and perceived challenge, linking pragmatic schooling goals with faith-oriented identity talk. Qurʾānic literacy clusters strongly with heritage identity but rarely with economic investment, indicating its function as spiritual rather than market capital. Children’s identity trajectories diverge: those confident in Arabic and Turkish articulate hybrid identities, while others frame Arabic competence as a deferred obligation. Overall, the study advances sociolinguistic understanding of Islam and heritage.