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In:Italo-Romance Heritage Languages: Multiple approaches
Edited by Eugenio Goria and Margherita Di Salvo
[Studies in Bilingualism 68] 2025
► pp. 247–288

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Italian in transit

Superdiverse repertoires and code-switching in Italian-based multilingual practices in a Berlin park

ORCiD logo with link | University of Potsdam
Published online: 11 September 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.68.11lup
Abstract
This chapter explores self-reported domains of use and actual instances of code-switching in Italian-based multilingual practices, which I label ‘Italian in Transit’ (IiT). My dataset comprises twenty-three interviews with speakers from sub-Saharan West Africa who learned Italian passing through Italy and occasionally reactivate it working as street vendors in a Berlin park. In Berlin, IiT acquires innovative functions, like being used as a phatic code to attract potential customers. Linguistically, I analyze code-switching in interviewer-directed utterances, excluding translinguistic wordings and culture-specific terms. The normalized frequency of code-switching varies across participants. However, IiT’s permeability for German function word insertions highlights the intense language contact in the park and is explained by IiT’s peculiar status as a minority, but not in-group code in its speakers’ superdiverse repertoires.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Sociolinguistic situation and data collection
    • 2.1Görlitzer Park
    • 2.2Corpus and methods
  • 3.Language representations
    • 3.1Superdiverse language repertoires
    • 3.2Acquisition modalities of Italian
    • 3.3Language uses in the park
    • 3.4Reactivation contexts of Italian in transit
  • 4.Theoretical framework
    • 4.1Code-switching: An interaction-based definition
    • 4.2Types of code-switching
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1Overview
    • 5.2Languages used and not used
    • 5.3Syntactic properties and position
    • 5.4Morphological categories and levels of switching
      • 5.4.1Utterance modifiers
      • 5.4.2Content words
      • 5.4.3Function words and phrases
      • 5.4.4Utterances
      • 5.4.5Morphological categories and emerging language relationships
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
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