Portraits of Sicilian-Australians: Exploring Identity through the Repertoire

This thesis explored how Sicilian-Australian women living in Melbourne used language in their identity construction. By drawing on language portraits and interviews, the findings suggested that the family time-space played a central role in developing a multilingual identity as participants consistently drew on the family time-space when creating connections with multilingual communities in Australia and overseas. Considering the extensive research focused on language shift, this study offers an innovative insight into the types of linguistic changes that are occurring within heritage language communities in culturally and linguistically diverse cities such as Melbourne.