Kurdish diaspora in the United States has attracted very little, if any, sociolinguistic investigation. In diasporas the symbolic role of language as a marker of group identity might even be greater since it is outside the ‘homeland’ that language maintenance becomes a concern for many linguistic groups. This study investigates what roles Kurdish plays in Kurdish Americans’ lives and their negotiations and discourses of identity construction, in what ways such roles have encouraged the community to maintain the language, and what the community has done to maintain the language from one generation to the next. To investigate these questions, this study carries out a sociolinguistic survey combined with in-depth interviews in the context of the Kurdish diasporic community in Southern California, and possibly Knoxville, Tennessee in order to compare the connections between language and identity in two different Kurdish communities in the country. Data analysis will be informed by discourse analysis in general and critical discourse analysis in particular to allow for a more detailed and critical investigation of language attitudes and ideologies in discourses of identity in the two communities.