Il Multilinguismo sulle confezioni di prodotti da forno al supermercato. Un'indagine empirica condotta a Torino.

The presence of multilingualism in commercial texts, particularly when English elements are involved, is a highly exploited marketing practice nowadays in Europe. Our society is greatly mixed, world trade and cultural exchanges are very fluid, identities (national, cultural, linguistic etc.) cannot be considered as fixed and distinctive entities anymore. Cultural contamination happens every day due to constant migrations, travels and virtual mobility, which have arisen as sociological phenomena especially in the late decades thanks to technical progress and economic events. The use of multilingual commercial texts has been introduced on the one hand to support communication between international companies and consumers around the globe, on the other to convey specific messages laying behind the bare text involved. In fact, every culture, community, social group and even every individual interprets language episodes according to personal code repertoires, knowledge and experience. The fact is that people do not only interpret commercial messages passively, but they rather reuse some of the linguistic elements previously met in the interaction actively, thus attaching new meaning to already existing occurrences. In order to better understand the complexity behind these everyday sociolinguistic practices, the translanguaging (TL) approach to language display analysis has become more and more popular within the academia because of its unbounded notions of language and linguistic-semiotic repertoire, whose definitions seem to be more reality-based than earlier sociolinguistic terms and concepts. Starting from these general considerations, this paper provides a qualitative investigation of supermarket products' labels collected in Turin (Italy), on whom multilingualism is present. The aim of this study is to provide empirical evidence of the spread of multilingual marketing practices and to discuss possible implications of this modern commercial context in Italy, in terms of influence on the consumer's final choice to purchase. At the same time, the generally undiscussed predominance and intelligibility of English on commercial texts is here questioned, according to both new academic perspectives on ELF and empirical data.