Discourse and identity practices in heritage language contexts have received significant attention in applied linguistics in recent years. One line of research in this realm has sought to adopt scales, the spatiotemporal niches within which social identification and learning take place. This article problematizes modernity as a scale of its own and investigates it in the context of the heritage language classroom discourse at a German high-school in Berlin. Microethnographic analyses of 10th-grade classroom interactional data reveal how Turkish heritage language students appropriate Turkish modernity and debate identity models around it while at the same time bringing to the table German/Western modernity and its contents. The article sheds light on the multiplicity of heritage language identities and situates scales as an important determinant in their construction.