From guest to family friend

This articles reports on the fieldwork methodology that was adopted to collect naturally occurring conversations within an Italo-Australian family. In particular, it focusses on the gradual development of the researcher’s position from an outsider to the family network to an insider of a special kind, as reflected through gradual changes in the topics and discourse structure of the conversations, the participants’ constellation and the languages used. The articles evaluates some major adjustments that had to be made to the ethnographic methods adopted as initial fieldwork models. It concludes that any method needs modifications in order to suit the specific speech community under scrutiny as well as the linguistic focus of the research.