Abstract
Educational transitions have been described as multifaceted and dynamic processes which involve extended time frames and interactions between children, parents, and professionals (Dockett and Perry, 2015; Petriwskyj et al. 2005) and are shaped by normative expectations about age-appropriate progression. In the context of forced migration, however, institutional normative expectations and time regimes frequently collide with biographical logics and temporal structures shaped by rupture and uncertainty (Thoma 2023). Such logics are often familial rather than individual, and can only be understood by taking the family as a unit of analysis. This article examines what an educational transition can mean for transnational families (Aden & Westphal, 2025) in the European migration regime. It draws on a linguistic ethnographic research – including participant observation and recorded interactions – carried out in South Tyrol, a region in northern Italy characterized by the coexistence of three officially recognized languages (Italian, German, and Ladin), each corresponding to a separate school system. This arrangement, created as a response to the linguistic oppression occurred under Fascist rule, is intended to protect local minorities, yet it reifies boundaries between communities: social and public life are connected to a mechanism of ethno-linguistic categorization. In this context, German is the majority language, spoken by around two thirds of the population (ASTAT, 2025) and associated with cultural and socio-economic privilege. For transnational families, school choice is thus a key site where language ideologies become operative, shaping access to socialization and upward social mobility. Moreover, as the region mandates institutional bilingualism, residents are expected to develop competencies in both German and Italian throughout their lives. The case analyzed is that of a transnational family with trajectories of migration from Ethiopia who was based in South Tyrol and relocated to Germany as their eldest child started primary school – a move precipitated not only by housing precarity but by the perceived threat of child removal by the social services. By focusing on this case, the article takes a family-level transition as a lens through which to investigate how structural and societal issues intersect with language ideologies at moments of educational and biographical change. This relocation constitutes a double transition: a biographical and spatial rupture that moves the family across two national contexts governed by distinct, and partly incompatible, language ideological regimes. The linguistic competencies expected of the child in South Tyrol are reconfigured in Germany, where Italian carries no institutional relevance and a different set of monolingual norms shapes educational expectations. The analysis shows how language ideologies – materialized in institutional expectations and observed everyday encounters – shape the family’s positioning within institutional settings. The article argues that understanding children’s educational transitions in forced migration contexts requires more than adapting to children’s linguistic repertoires or age-appropriate academic expectations: Rather, a comprehensive understanding of children’s educational transitions necessitates systematic attention to the broader contextual conditions in which these transitions are embedded. It demands systematic attention to intersecting social, legal, residential, and sociolinguistic structures that shape biographical trajectories – and to the ways in which spatial transitions between national language ideological regimes produce new forms of precarity for children and families already navigating rupture and uncertainty.