This contribution illustrates the specific sociolinguistic landscape of South Tyrol, an Italian province where the majority of the population is German-speaking. First, we explain to what extent the division of society into separate language groups has remained in force to this day and to which degree this hinders the achievement of German-Italian bilingual everyday life. Secondly, the discussion focusses on residents with foreign citizenship almost 10 % of the population) and how they deal with and live this local sociolinguistic situation. Against the backdrop of the changed transformed socio-demographic situation, we discuss possible strategies as to how the longstanding focus on bilingualism may be expanded to include multilingualism, which is already mostly in place
