Multicultural and multilingual classrooms are increasingly a characteristic of educational settings worldwide. While global migration contributes to this trend, so do efforts to revitalise and sustain minority and Indigenous languages and cultures. This situation can create challenges for both educators and students who may not share a common language or cultural background in mathematics and statistics classrooms. Teaching and learning in multilingual and multicultural mathematics and statistics classrooms has been underpinned by a deficit discourse that views language other than the language of instruction as a “problem”, regardless of research developments considering the presence of multiple languages from ‘language as resource’ (Planas & Setati-Phakeng, 2014) and ‘language as sources of meaning’ (Barwell, 2018) perspectives.