Chapter 4 explores the non-Indigenous community languages which form the single biggest site of language learning and maintenance in Australia. For the communities and families who have established and grown these sites of teaching and learning, the languages represent long-standing investments of commitment, love, identity, and intergenerational transmission of history and culture. The community language school communities which our students attend on weekends (often located in borrowed spaces, such as churches and temples) can be a very large part of students’ emotional and intellectual development. Given the diversity of the field, the chapter provides only a sketch of the extraordinary array of community languages, but it also discusses how mainstream schools provides some students with the opportunity to learn and extend their languages. The chapter explores the options in primary and secondary schools to learn a variety of selected languages within the curriculum and invites the reader to dig into some of the inequities in school provision in different Australian states and territories.

The myth that schools must regulate writing starts as English shifts to schools (away from home instruction), and schools shift to English (away from classical languages). Its consequences include making English regulation common and desirable, and making language variation a threat. Diverse ways of writing persist, but they aren’ studied in school. Closer to the truth is that language diversity and language knowledge are human rights, but school writing focuses only on a narrow part of a continuum of common ways of writing.