ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to analyze the educational arena for heritage language (HL) learners of Arabic at the university level in Denmark, and shows that how clashes between top-down policies and bottom-up educational choices are dealt with at the institutional level. The antagonism of "Arabic-as-resource" versus "Arabic-as-problem" in the Danish media and politics is found also in education, a sector considered to be very important for language policy and language status. The increasing number of HL learners who wanted to study Arabic together with the faculty's language planning agency supported by centrally organized university initiatives to promote pattern breakers, met with virtually no resistance at any level of the university. Rather, the prevailing discourse was that of "Arabic-as-resource," which matched the profile of University of Southern Denmark as being the university with the highest number of students with immigrant backgrounds in Denmark.
