Trilingual Talk in Sicilian-Australian Migrant Families : Playing Out Identities Through Language Alternation

This book explores the linguistic and cultural identities of Sicilians in Australia, through conversations gathered within the family, survey data and interviews. The study is placed in the context of the family migrant experience and the shifting attitudes towards immigrant languages in Australia. This book is an indepth study of the linguistic dynamics among Sicilian migrants in Australia, one of the largest regional groups in the context of Italian emigration. Through conversations gathered within the family, language choice and language alternation among Sicilian, English and Italian are explored in talk between first and second generation. The analytical approach combines the interactional with the language and identity perspective, focusing on code-switching as a strategy to construct and contest conversational and social identities. A corpus of quantitative surveys and other Sicilian-Australian voices gathered through interviews complement the conversational data, contributing to the representation of the linguistic and cultural identities of Sicilian migrants. The study is placed in the context of the family migrant experience and the shifting attitudes towards immigrant languages in Australia Front Matter....Pages i-xvi Introduction....Pages 1-3 The Context of Italian Migration....Pages 4-24 From Bilingualism in Sicily to Trilingualism in Australia....Pages 25-73 Approaches to Multilingual Talk....Pages 74-89 Trilingual Talk in Family A....Pages 90-163 Trilingual Talk in Family B....Pages 164-234 From Qualitative to Quantitative Data: Language Choice in the Family....Pages 235-268 Summary and Conclusions....Pages 269-276 Back Matter....Pages 277-312