Dr. Muhammad Ali al-Khouli

People often ask why I continue to use the term “third culture kids” and why I hesitate to rely solely on “heritage language learners” to describe the group I study. My concern is not with the importance of heritage language studies or the contributions of researchers in that field. It concerns the question that a label places at the forefront of our attention: are we describing only an individual’s relationship with their family’s language, or are we also describing their cultural experience, identity, and sense of belonging?

My Research Journey Since 2017

My research interest in third culture kids began in 2017, and I chose this term to describe the group I wanted to study. I mention this without claiming to have been the first to use the term in Arabic or to write about the phenomenon. The term had already appeared in media and educational writing. In 2014, CNN Arabic published a feature entitled “Third Culture Kids,” and in 2016, an educational article in Al-Ahram discussed the phenomenon and its relationship with international schools and identity.

What I had not found at that time, within the material available to me, was a clear, specialized line of research in Arabic that treated teaching Arabic to the children of Arab migrants as a subject in its own right, examined their characteristics and needs, and proposed foundations and standards for their curricula.

This was the starting point from which my research developed. I co-authored a study on the formation of third culture among Syrian students at Turkish universities, published in 2021. I then completed my doctoral dissertation on developing foundations and standards for an Arabic curriculum for Arab third culture kids, recorded at Marmara University on 11 May 2022. Subsequently, I helped disseminate the term among researchers and the master’s and doctoral students I supervised. I therefore regard my work as one of the early specialized efforts in Arabic on teaching Arabic to this group, rather than the first Arabic writing on third culture kids in general.

When the Subject Was an English-Speaking Community Living Abroad

The concept of “third culture” took shape in the study of groups whose lives crossed cultural boundaries. In 1963, John Useem, Ruth Hill Useem, and John Donoghue published a study of the roles of Americans and non-Western people in cross-cultural administration. In 1967, John and Ruth Useem studied the American community in India and published their research as The Interfaces of a Binational Third Culture. Ruth Hill Useem and Richard Downie later examined the experiences of children who had lived outside their families’ home country in their 1976 article, Third-Culture Kids.

The Useems’ foundational research was not a study of teaching English to Indians. Its subject was Americans living in India and the social and cultural interactions that emerged in a different society. In this line of inquiry, “third culture” therefore appeared as a framework for understanding relationships and experiences formed between groups and cultures. Attention subsequently expanded to children who shared these experiences with their families.

Later, Ruth Hill Useem and Ann Baker Cottrell studied the experiences of third culture kids in adulthood. David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken helped popularize the concept, particularly through their book The Third Culture Kid Experience: Growing Up Among Worlds.

In subsequent years, researchers debated the boundaries of the concept. Some studies noted that its historical use had often been associated with privileged, mobile Western families, and that it did not automatically describe the experiences of migrants’ children, refugees, and other groups in the same way or to the same extent.

When the Subject Was the Language of a Non-Dominant Community

In a different context, the term heritage language gained prominence in studies of language education relating to migrant families and minority language communities. In US scholarship, it is used to describe a language with which a learner has family or community ties, existing alongside a dominant language in society and its institutions.

In the United States, for example, English is the dominant societal language, while languages such as Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and others are studied by children whose families speak them or who have ties to them at home and in the community.

It would be inappropriate to attribute the origin of the term to a single researcher without decisive historical evidence. Several scholars contributed to defining the field and studying its learners and teaching approaches, including:

Guadalupe Valdés: She wrote about heritage language teaching and bilingual learners and studied Spanish education in the United States. Her work shows that this field concerns educational practices and learners’ circumstances, rather than merely describing their vocabulary or grammar.

Joshua A. Fishman: He examined the history of heritage language education in the United States as part of a broader interest in the sociology of language and language maintenance in social contexts. This breadth is evident in his chapter “300-Plus Years of Heritage Language Education in the United States.”

Nelleke Van Deusen-Scholl: She discussed the definition of heritage language from educational and sociopolitical perspectives in her 2003 article, Toward a Definition of Heritage Language: Sociopolitical and Pedagogical Considerations. The title itself shows that the discussion went beyond identifying a language to examining its social and educational position.

Olga Kagan: She examined Russian instruction for learners with family ties to the language and co-authored, with Kathleen Dillon, “A New Perspective on Teaching Russian: Focus on the Heritage Learner.” The study advocated an approach encompassing linguistic, communicative, and cultural dimensions, including literature and history.

Silvina Montrul: She studied language acquisition and bilingualism, investigating languages such as Spanish, Hindi, and Romanian among speakers in the United States. Her work demonstrates that heritage language studies may examine more than one language and that their questions include how speakers acquire and develop those languages.

These works show that heritage language researchers have not necessarily overlooked culture; some have addressed it explicitly.

Nevertheless, the label itself places language at the forefront: what language does the learner know? What is their level of proficiency? What are their educational needs? This is an observation about the effect and implications of the label, rather than a judgment about researchers’ intentions or every aspect of their work.

The Issue Is Also the Perspective Embedded in the Label

When a study examines an English-speaking American community living in India, its subject appears within a cultural and social framework that spans societies. When a study examines a minority language community in a society dominated by English, “heritage language” often functions as an educational classification for the language to which learners are connected through family or community.

This is a difference in the perspective conveyed by the label. It does not establish that researchers intended to exclude culture or diminish its importance. It does, however, raise a legitimate question: why is the experience of an English-speaking community abroad given a broad cultural label, while the experience of other language communities in American or English-speaking society is given a label focused on language?

The label “heritage language learners” highlights learners’ relationship with their family’s language and their needs in it. On its own, however, it does not describe their relationship with family culture and the host society, or their experiences of identity and belonging.

Conversely, “third culture kids” should not be used without an operational definition. The boundaries of the concept are themselves contested, and it does not necessarily encompass every child who has learned their family’s language or lived in two countries.

Why Do I Continue to Use “Third Culture Kids”?

I use the term when the research extends beyond teaching a family language to encompass identity, belonging, socialization between two or more cultures, and the interaction between family culture and the culture of the society in which a child grows up. In this context, “third culture kids” makes the cultural dimension visible in the name of the group and allows language to be addressed as part of the child’s cultural and social experience.

I consider “heritage language learners” appropriate when the research question focuses specifically on learners’ relationship with their family’s language: how did they acquire it? What is their proficiency? What do they need in reading, writing, or further language development? In my view, however, the label alone is insufficient when research also examines the formation of identity and belonging and the cultural content of learning.

For this reason, when a study addresses dimensions beyond language proficiency, I prefer to refer to “third culture kids who are learning Arabic or have family and cultural ties to it.” My aim is not to eliminate the term “heritage language learners,” but to identify the domain each term describes and choose a label that actually reflects the research question.

My Position

This historical comparison does not suggest that Ruth Hill Useem studied English teaching in India, or that heritage language researchers studied their languages without attending to culture. It suggests that the subject and its label differed according to the community’s position and the research question: English-speaking groups living abroad were studied in terms of a cultural and social experience, while many studies examined non-dominant language communities through their relationship with the family language and their educational needs.

This is why I continue to use “third culture kids”: in my research context, it is better able to make visible a cultural and identity-related experience that may not be apparent in a label focused on language alone.

Accuracy still requires us to define the group we study clearly and to avoid extending the concept to every learner of a family language without explaining the characteristics of their cultural experience.

Sources and References

1. Third Culture Kids

1. Useem, John, Ruth Hill Useem, and John Donoghue. “Men in the Middle of the Third Culture: The Roles of American and Non-Western People in Cross-Cultural Administration.” Human Organization, vol. 22, no. 3, 1963, pp. 169–179. https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.22.3.5470n44338kk6733
2. Useem, John, and Ruth Hill Useem. “The Interfaces of a Binational Third Culture: A Study of the American Community in India.” Journal of Social Issues, vol. 23, no. 1, 1967, pp. 130–143. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1967.tb00567.x
3. Useem, Ruth Hill, and Richard D. Downie. “Third-Culture Kids.” Today’s Education, vol. 65, no. 3, 1976, pp. 103–105.
4. Useem, Ruth Hill, and Ann Baker Cottrell. “Adult Third Culture Kids.” In Carolyn D. Smith, ed., Strangers at Home: Essays on the Effects of Living Overseas and Coming “Home” to a Strange Land. Aletheia Publications, 1996.
5. Pollock, David C., and Ruth E. Van Reken. The Third Culture Kid Experience: Growing Up Among Worlds. Intercultural Press, 1999.
6. Fechter, Anne-Meike, and Mari Korpela. “Interrogating Child Migrants or ‘Third Culture Kids’ in Asia: An Introduction.” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, vol. 25, no. 4, 2016, pp. 422–428. https://doi.org/10.1177/0117196816676565
7. Korpela, Mari. “A (Sub)Culture of Their Own? Children of Lifestyle Migrants in Goa, India.” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, vol. 25, no. 4, 2016, pp. 470–488. https://doi.org/10.1177/0117196816671959

2. Heritage Languages

1. Valdés, Guadalupe. “The Teaching of Heritage Languages: An Introduction for Slavic-Teaching Professionals.” In Olga Kagan and Benjamin Rifkin, eds., The Learning and Teaching of Slavic Languages and Cultures: Toward the 21st Century. Slavica Publishers, 2000, pp. 375–403.
2. Fishman, Joshua A. “300-Plus Years of Heritage Language Education in the United States.” In Joy Kreeft Peyton, Donald A. Ranard, and Scott McGinnis, eds., Heritage Languages in America: Preserving a National Resource. Center for Applied Linguistics and Delta Systems, 2001.
3. Kagan, Olga, and Kathleen Dillon. “A New Perspective on Teaching Russian: Focus on the Heritage Learner.” Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 45, no. 3, 2001, pp. 507–518.
4. Van Deusen-Scholl, Nelleke. “Toward a Definition of Heritage Language: Sociopolitical and Pedagogical Considerations.” Journal of Language, Identity & Education, vol. 2, no. 3, 2003, pp. 211–230. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327701JLIE0203_4
5. Valdés, Guadalupe. “Bilingualism, Heritage Language Learners, and SLA Research: Opportunities Lost or Seized?” The Modern Language Journal, vol. 89, 2005, pp. 410–426. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2005.00314.x
6. Montrul, Silvina. The Acquisition of Heritage Languages. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

3. Related Studies and Publications in Arabic

1. Al-Anan, Moumen, and Muhammad Ali al-Khouli. “Features of Third Culture Formation among Syrian Students at Turkish Universities.” Tibyan Journal of Educational and Social Sciences, no. 2, 2021, pp. 143–173. [In Arabic; title translated.] https://doi.org/10.55857/2285-000-002-005
2. Al-Khouli, Muhammad Ali. “Foundations and Standards for Developing an Arabic Language Curriculum for Arab Third Culture Kids.” Doctoral dissertation, Marmara University, 11 May 2022. [In Arabic; title translated.]
3. Rizk, Jessica. “Third Culture Kids: An Identity Crisis and a Fragmented Concept of Home.” CNN Arabic, 20 August 2014. [In Arabic; title translated.]
4. Ramadan, Buthaina Abdel Raouf. “Children without Roots.” Al-Ahram Daily, 18 September 2016. [In Arabic; title translated.]

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