Bilingual Selves: Exploring Identity through Language Portraits

This dissertation deals with the relationship between identity and bilingualism, a worldwide phenomenon affecting more than half of the population. Although bilingualism has been widely explored by linguistics and researchers, little attention has been paid to how bilingual individuals themselves interpret their linguistic repertoires in relation to their identity. It is critical to understand how bilingual speakers interpret their sense of self in a globalized world where bilingualism has become the norm rather than the exception. This dissertation is divided into three sections: the first two are theoretical, while the third chapter includes the results obtained through interviews with bilingual people. The first chapter provides a brief overview of various attempts by several authors to define bilingualism in previous studies, highlighting the presence of considerable disagreement on the topic, and including the underlying causes for bilingualism, like migration, globalization, education, family, politics, and work opportunities. Furthermore, this chapter will examine the distinct types and dimensions of the phenomenon, including three main categories into which bilingual individuals can be distinguished. The second chapter analyses how biculturalism and bilingualism may influence a person’s identity and self-perception, exploring the emotional intensity each language has for a bilingual person ne how these emotions can be seen in language portraits. In the third chapter, the literature presented in the first and the second chapters is compared with the data obtained from a questionnaire and interviews conducted with bilingual individuals. In order to investigate the interviewees’ linguistic repertoires and the feelings toward the languages shaping their identity, the language portrait technique was employed as a research tool. The findings shed light on the fluidity of identity construction among bilinguals, which is far more dynamic than what traditional models suggest. Participants often described their languages as integrated at different levels in their emotional world, with some languages evoking stronger affective, cultural, or autobiographical resonance than others. Moreover, several participants reported slight personality changes when switching languages, a phenomenon closely tied to context, interlocutors, and cultural norms rather than to linguistic competence alone. The results challenge simplistic or deterministic views of bilingual identity and demonstrate the need to consider emotional, cultural, and experiential dimensions when examining bilingualism. The dissertation concludes by outlining theoretical, methodological, and pedagogic implications for future research on bilingual identity, particularly emphasising the value of multimodal methods, such as language portraits, in capturing aspects of lived experience that remain invisible in purely quantitative approaches.