Tertium Comparationis: Issue 1/2026, 32. Volume

This article examines how linguistic and social inequalities shape preschool-to-school transitions in an officially trilingual border region. Drawing on sociolinguistic perspectives and scholarship on educational transitions, we conceptualise schools as key institutions that both reflect and reproduce broader social hierarchies. Building on the notion of transition regimes, we argue that schools operate as ‘sorting machines’: through the ascription of particular ‘family languages’ to children, they categorise students into distinct educational trajectories that mirror societal divisions along lines of class, language, and migrantisation. Using multi-sited linguistic ethnography across a German-medium primary school in South Tyrol, Italy, and linguistically minoritised families, we investigate how these sorting processes unfold in practice. We show how teachers and families interpret and negotiate the classifications imposed on children, and how schools reproduce established patterns of linguistic and social stratification. Our findings highlight transitions as relational, socio-politically embedded processes in which children’s life chances and future opportunities are shaped before formal school entry.

Keywords
Raciolinguistic ideologies, migrantisation, minoritisation, reform pedagogy, Montessori, South Tyrol