People move to other countries due to various reasons. Most of the time international migration has the consequence of different linguistic and cultural surroundings. In Sweden for example, almost 20% of the pupils have another mother tongue than Swedish (Skolverket 2014). In Switzerland over 40% of all marriages are bi-national (ERZ Bern 2013). These numbers are rising and due to different studies that show how pupils increase their scholastic success rate if they experience mother tongue tuition (e.g. Skolverket 2009, Giudici 2014), there is a need of a sound working language policy for pupils of various linguistic and cultural background. This paper takes into consideration frame conditions of mother tongue tuition in two European countries. On the one hand Sweden, as a monolingual EU-member state and on the other hand Switzerland, which has four official languages and does not belong to the EU. These different starting points are set into relation to their policy documents regarding mother tongue tuition. Interviews with representatives from institutions in both countries give a deeper insight into the local management of the issue. As a final part, best-practice examples and challenges in the two countries are compared and a state-of-the-art is presented. Since there is a big discrepancy between intentions and implementations of language policy documents in Sweden (Vetenskapsrådet 2014) , more research in the field is requested. This paper tries to do so by opposing this Nordic country to Switzerland.