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South Tyrol, situated on the border between Austria and Italy, has been considered a 'peace model' by many nation-states since the creation of the province's autonomy statutes. The aim of those statutes was to allow for minority protection of the German- and Ladin- speaking communities while also permitting Austria to be the 'protector' of South Tyrol even though the province is situated in Italy. A by-product of the statutes was the creation of the 'separate but equal' education system, which allowed the German-, Italian- and Ladin- speaking communities to have individual schools in order to protect their culture and language identity. In recent years marriages between members of different language groups have increased and a requirement for applicants for certain civil service positions to have an adequate comprehension of the L2 or in some cases L3 have been imposed. In her doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford, 'Half spaghetti- half knôdel: cultural division through the lens of language learning', Anne Wand has examined how the South Tyrolean school system has coped with the changing circumstances and with the pressures to move to an increasingly bilingual society.