ABSTRACT: This linguistic ethnography, carried out overfourteen months (2012-2013) in five educational settings in Marseille, Francein which Standard French and Modern Standard Arabic are taught to school-agedyouth, calls into question essentializing representations by the French Stateand popular media that construct second-generation youth of North and WestAfrican backgrounds as increasingly pious and more closely identified withtransnational Islam than with locally grounded forms of belonging and being French.The research question asks how second-generation youth who live in Marseilleand identify as Muslim draw linguistically on both, family and peer-learnednon-standard repertoires of Marseillais French, dialectal Arabic, and otherheritage languages (e.g., Wolof, Comorian), and school-learned standardrepertoires of Arabic and French, in the development of their identities,seeking sometimes to reanimate and sometimes to contest alignments with theinstitutional categories that predicate religiosity and transnationality ofthem. Data collected with these youth in the private and public schools,secular and Muslim community centers where their language education takes placeshows that youth micro-communities coalesce around shared stances—expressedlinguistically through recurring preferences to use standard or non-standardlanguages—to such social categories as marginality, piousness, kinship andgenerational difference, foreignness, and Frenchness. Indeed, as they chooseamong the ideologically weighted linguistic options made available to themthrough schooling and associational attendance, they are likewise communicatingbroader orientations they hold to Marseille—as long-term destination orimminent point of departure to the Muslim world—and, in turn, the social andeducational trajectories incident to these orientations.