Diasporas are typically seen as the result of population mobility and change. Moving beyond perceiving them as homogenous and static communities, recent socio-/applied linguistic research has focused on the dynamics of membership negotiation. The complex ways in which individuals position self and other as ‘insiders’ or/and ‘outsiders’ has been associated with claiming belonging and fitting in, in the ‘host’/’majority’ society vis a vis an imagined diaspora context. Belonging is a relatively new theoretical construct for socio- applied linguistic research. In the current environment of intense population movement, following geopolitical changes, financial pressures and climate mobility, understanding belonging has significant societal relevance.

Accordingly, this thesis focuses on one particularly community, the Turkish Cypriot community in London, as a case and conduit for unpacking belonging at individual and group level; particularly in relation to material places that constitute focal points for the members. I pay special attention to diasporic associations, which are understudied in linguistic scholarship. Diasporic associations provide a locus for communities and individuals to socialise, negotiate resources and strategies for doing ‘us’ and ‘them’ and converge or diverge from norms and behaviours that are associated with membership to the community. These positions however are not linear, mutually exclusive binaries; to the contrary, they constitute resources for the individual and the group as they construct an imagined collectivity.

Through the analysis of interviews, ethnographic observations, real life interactions and body maps, this thesis takes a language first approach to belonging which is seen as political, emplaced and discursively constructed. I use the concept of place-belonging to show how members negotiate fluidity and stability of their membership in community; by reference to (primarily but not exclusively) linguistic practices and behaviours that they mobilise in discourse, members of the community ‘do’ place-belonging in habitual practices and routines. I discuss in detail the significance of studying diasporic association for future research and close the thesis with offering directions for future socio-/applied-linguistic studies.