Migration is undoubtedly a linguistic fact. For the millions of migrants who today "inhabit" the Italian language, this takes on a decisive role for social inclusion, relations with natives, but also as "lingua franc" which allows dialogue between migrants of different origins. Similar to what happened in Italy at the time of in-ternal migration, when, in place of migrant languages, linguistic plurality was given by dialects. The question is: is Italian still enriched by contact with this multiplicity of languages? The first tangible signs concern lexicon. "Migrant words" spread, de-scribing religion, culture, food, clothes and many other typical realities of the coun-tries of origin. In the operas of the migration literature there are many examples, but only the check on other sources (journalistic archives, visibility in the linguistic landscape, online distribution etc.) can show whether the engraftment in the Italian language is effective or temporary. The paper discusses some emblematic cases.
Keywords: Heteroglossia; harragas; italian L2; literature of migration; lingua fran-ca; migrant words.