There has been a recent surge of interest in language practices and practices of language education in preschools in multilingual contexts around Europe (e.g. Krompàk 2015; Neumann & Kuhn 2020; Thomauske, 2017; Zettl 2019;). Such research has provided in-depth observations of practices and policies in institutions of early childhood education and has shown how these link back to discourses and ideologies circulating in the respective national or regional context. The present paper builds on these insights and investigates both institutional language policies as well as public discourse around these policies in the multilingual context of the Italian province South Tyrol. The structure of the education system in South Tyrol is tripartite, reflecting the three language groups officially recognised as ‘autochthonous’. Educational policies are decided on separately by ‘German’, ‘Italian’ and ‘Ladin’ educational institutions, which also holds for preschools. Language practices and language education, in particular in preschools, have repeatedly been the subject of heated public debates in the province. The present paper will untangle these debates, and take a discourse-historical approach (Reisigl & Wodak 2016) to analysing policy documents released by the institutions representing ‘German’, ‘Italian’ and ‘Ladin’ preschools, political documents as well as media coverage on the subject. In doing so, we will uncover societal and political expectations and prescriptions on language education in preschools. Finally, these analyses will feed back into an ethnographic investigation of language practices and policies in South Tyrolean preschools carried out in a related project, and thus enhance our understanding of interconnections between language practices, policies and wider ideologies (Johnson 2011).

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