Over the years, I had the opportunity to network with many multilingual families, for personal (as mine is a multilingual family too) and professional reasons (as a teacher of languages and language teacher educator). According to the 2021 census, in Australia, 27.6% of the population was born overseas and 22% reported to use a language other than English at home.

In this third blog entry for the Multilingual Stance series, Ester de Jong (University of Colorado Denver) and Marianne Turner (Monash University) explore what it means to treat multilingualism as the everyday norm for all students, not only in language classrooms or for multilingual learners. This entry pushes educators to rethink how language is positioned, valued, and enacted across whole‑school environments, classroom practices, and policy structures.

Permission is only the beginning: students’ multilingual repertoires become classroom resources when teachers create meaningful opportunities for them to think with those repertoires.

Dr. Anne Reath Warren, Uppsala University, Sweden Since the Home Language Reform in 1977, primary and secondary school students in Sweden who regularly use a language other than Swedish at home can apply to study that language through an elective subject called “Mother Tongue” (Reath Warren, 2022). In the academic year 2025/26, 28,9% of students in the compulsory school (Grades K-9) were eligible for “Mother Tongue” and approximately 187 languages were taught through the subj

In classrooms around the world, including in Australia, linguistic diversity is increasingly common. Many children arrive at school with rich repertoires of languages, dialects, stories, and cultural knowledge. At the same time, the books we offer them can sometimes tell a more limited story about language, learning, and belonging.

In applied linguistics, multilingualism has become an established—and largely uncontested—ideal. Concepts such as translanguaging, linguistic repertoires, and challenges to monolingual norms are now widely discussed in scholarship and policy.