“…This shared process of identity maintenance differs in a fundamental way from the preservation of cultural and linguistic heritage among settled Iranian migrant communities that has been documented in the 'traditional' countries of Iranian migration, such as Australia, Canada, and the United States (Mostofi, 2003). The existing literature on Iranians abroad skews toward examinations of the diaspora in the United States (Mobasher, 2012) and Australia (Asghari-Fard and Zakia-Hossain, 2017) and focuses on issues such as language retention (Modarresi, 2001;Megerdoomian, 2012), sensory worlds (Dennis and Warin, 2007), signage (Izadi and Parvaresh, 2016), and the negotiation of identities, given Iran's contentious politics (Mobasher, 2006). As this article shows, these factors notably different from the process of identity maintenance we encountered in the UAE.…”