Abstract
South Tyrol is an Italian province with three official languages (Italian, German, Ladin) and three corresponding recognised ‘language groups’. It is thus a place where ethnolinguistic groupness has been institutionalised, and residents must declare affiliation with one of these language groups to gain access to welfare, jobs in the public sector and political representation. Analogous to these groups, South Tyrol also has three separate tracks of education conceived on the basis of ethnolinguistic separation, starting with preschool. While teachers in the respective educational institutions need to have declared their corresponding language group affiliation, a principle of ‘free enrollment’ holds for children. Particularly for German-speaking preschools, this has produced tensions over which kinds of ethnolinguistically categorised children (should) attend these educational institutions, and in which proportion.
In our paper, we will draw on two ethnographic projects on multilingualism and language education in four preschool groups at three different German-speaking preschools to explore how ethnolinguistic categorisations are negotiated on the ground by teachers, children and parents. In the preschool sites we observed, teachers and parents repeatedly position children and (other) parents and families along different lines of national, ethnic, and linguistic differentiation, at times producing more nuanced categorisations and at times reproducing the aforementioned institutionalised ‘language groups’. We argue that in particular the institutional categorisation of the three preschools as ‘German’ was reproduced by teachers and parents, evoking expectations and tensions in both these groups of social actors around their responsibilities in the children’s language education and education generally. In doing so, we unpack how these tensions emerged and explore how teachers, children and parents in the four preschool groups engage with language-related group labels and how such labels are stabilized, questioned and transformed.