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Reflecting on data collected from research in 2012-2013, some of which have been published, I seek to discuss the multiple ways in which youths as students use multiple languages in their processes of learning and socializing within an educational institution. My aim is here is to provide and share a comprehensive restatement of my work as a possible foundation for a monograph-length treatment. Using the notion that there are orders of indexical/social meanings of language, I argue that there are multiple orders of multiple language use present in vocational high schools. These orders can either be emergent from student interaction and the practical/work-oriented purposes of vocational training or they can be instated by the institution of language classes in vocational high schools. While the institutional side of vocational high schools demand monolingual competence in multiple languages, paying ethnographic attention to the actual language use points to a polylingual and translingual norm of communication. Here, the use of linguistic features from multiple languages to fulfill social communicative purposes is pragmatically more salient than full competence in multiple languages. In both their peer group communication of “being youth” and their vocational training of “becoming adults”, students alternate between the multiple footings afforded by the indexical meanings they associate with Javanese, Indonesian and English. Instead of using a certain form of youth language, I show that students have a polycentric orientation to multiple social meanings of locality, tradition, nationalism, lifestyle and global connections. Learning to be youth and become adult in 21^st century Java is thus inherently multilingual, although with differences between institutional definitions and interactional practice, differences which tend to be put under erasure through various language ideological techniques and institutional power relations.