Abstract
The autonomous province of Bozen-Bolzano - also called South Tyrol - is located in northeast Italy, on the border with Austria and Switzerland. Due to its geohistorical past, the province has given rise to a diverse society, with three ethnolinguistic groups sharing the same territory: German, Italian and Ladinspeaking groups, in combination with a relatively recent migrant population. These historic, linguistic and social components affect this fertile territory for sociolinguistic studies and are the background for this research, which aims to investigate how migrants who have settled in South Tyrol experience the language policies and the institutional division in society. The research design consists of two methods: document assessment and semi-structured individual interviews with 20 migrants who were settled in South Tyrol for at least one year. The outcomes show that the policy of the Declaration of linguistic affiliation is unclear to some of the participants, who showed difficulty in discerning the purpose of the document or even declared a total lack of knowledge of the policy. Among the participants who demonstrated a greater understanding of the policy, there was a strong rejection of it, the Declaration being classified as incompatible with the European context and the current linguistic diversity present in the province. Furthermore, the results show that most of the people interviewed claim to perceive a clear social division among ethnolinguistic groups, and, according to them, the Declaration policy, together with the tripartite school system, are the main reasons for this division in society.