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Officially described as a monolingual country (whose political unification was originally legitimised because of linguistic unity), Italy is, in fact, very multilingual (De Mauro 2016). Different factors contribute to such linguistic diversity. First, the internal fragmentation resulting from the country’s history. In addition to the 12 minority languages or linguistic minorities recognised by the state, a set of ‘Italian dialects’ (sometimes defined as ‘regional languages’) belonging to various Romance family dialectal groups are also spoken and enjoy some form of cultural recognition at the local level, along with other unrecognised minority languages (Toso 2020; Fiorentini 2022). Secondly, immigration, with a growing share of foreign nationals currently accounting for 9.4 per cent of the resident population. Finally, globalisation and the internationalisation of university research and teaching systems are creating new areas of language contact, mainly between English and Italian. Linguistic diversity and its management are often the subject of political debate, not least for their close ties with nation-building, national identity, identity politics, and linguistic justice. Language policies are the object of study of the interdisciplinary research field called language policy and planning (Dell’Aquila & Iannàccaro 2004; Gazzola et al. 2024), located at the crossroads of linguistics, law, and the social sciences. The panel aims to explore the broad topic of language politics and policy in Italy from an interdisciplinary perspective, covering the issues on which public debate has concentrated over the last decades. These include (but are not limited to): the promotion and promotion of historical linguistic minorities; the calls for recognition of certain ‘regional languages’ or dialects (the use of which in the home is in decline); the linguistic integration of immigrants into an Italian-based education system and the workplace, with the political and ideological tensions this entails; digital and Large Language Models-related language policy in Italy; and the recent concerns regarding the domain loss of Italian in university teaching and research, public life, and business activities. The panel welcomes contributions from different academic fields as well as from decision-makers, in a spirit of dialogue between theory and practice.