Approaches to Multilingual Talk

Abstract

In order to analyse the trilingual conversations of my Sicilian-Australian participants, I draw on the interactional perspectives that have been adopted in the study of multilingualism.¹ The main purpose of this chapter therefore is to place my analytical approach within a broad theoretical framework. As will be shown, I give priority to the socio-functional and more specifically the identity-related explanation of language alternation² (Gafaranga, 2007a), to the preference of other approaches (for example grammatical or psycholinguistic).