In 2025, a high school in Trentino, Northern Italy, posted a public display in its main hall featuring a short video on a wall-mounted screen. The video was built around a series of  parole intraducibili , or “untranslatable words.” Students collected examples from their peers in multiple languages, emphasizing speakers of heritage languages whose families had migrated to Italy since the 1990s. These included not only languages with a  standard codified by institutions and written texts —such as Serbian, Mandarin Chinese, or Albanian—but also non-standardized varieties, such as Moroccan Arabic.  Yet to my surprise, the video also featured the local vernacular, commonly known as  dialetto trentino , the “Trentino Dialect”—a variety that, as a  dialetto  rather than  lingua ,  has long been positioned in subordination to the national standard .…