Doing or undoing Italian? Multilingual practices in Berlin’s superdiverse restaurants

This study investigates the use of Italian in Berlin’s Italian restaurants managed by non-Italian speakers. Drawing on data from the RestITA corpus, which includes extensive documentation of linguistic landscape signs and narrative video interviews with restaurant owners and staff, we identify a correlation between the strategic positioning of languages in the linguistic landscape and the stances adopted by local workers toward monolingual ideologies versus hybrid linguistic practices. Our analysis reveals two distinct language regimes. In the first, Italian is symbolically foregrounded while German plays the more significant semantic role; in the second, linguistic boundaries tend to blur, as is typical of cases of «Italian in Transit» (Lupica Spagnolo, 2023). By examining how language is displayed and discussed, we explore whether these actors are «doing languages» by reproducing monolingual norms or «undoing languages» through translanguaging.