The paper will focus on the role of trilingual education within the current context of regional minority languages growingly encountering migrant-induced language diversity. The typical insistence on the national languages as main languages of schooling (Kroon & Spotti 2011) is based on the idea that immersion in each of the target languages triggers the best outcomes, thus leading to language separation pedagogies. In fact, also in trilingual education models in which three languages are regularly used in instruction, languages are still kept hermetically apart in instruction (Arocena & Gorter 2013; Riemersma & de Vries, 2011). In this context, a project conducted in 5 trilingual schools in Friesland, the Northern province of the Netherlands, will be introduced. In a multiple exploratory case-study (Yin 2014), a translanguaging approach was developed and implemented in five primary schools with the aims of: a) reducing the language separation pedagogies practiced in the schools and b) giving immigrant languages a place in the schools’ trilingual model. Results show that a translanguaging approach was used to design activities in which the three main languages of instruction jointly play a role, whereas a language awareness approach (Young & Hélot 2003) was adopted in order to valorise immigrant languages.

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