The late 19^th Century saw the transnational emergence of language tests as a tool by which to create ‘white men’s’ countries. Historians have long acknowledged that the Dictation Test was a key tool in the exclusion of people of colour from an imagined ‘White Australia’. Crucially, the Test did not offend British liberal sensitivities because it discriminated on the basis of language and literacy, rather than explicitly on the basis of race. This paper will visit the urban, spatially grounded processes whereby this Test was sanctioned by settler legislators. It does so by moving off the polyglot streets of 1890s Melbourne, and between the heavy bluestone walls of the Magistrate’s Court, where JPs judged the English ability of Asian hawker licenses applicants, and Parliament House, where self-consciously ‘English-speaking men’ espoused a racially exclusive form of national belonging. Sliding between the geo-spatial scales of bench, building, street, city, nation and empire, I explore how in-situ urban speech(es) informed the imagined and legal construction of the Australian nation in the lead up to 1901 Federation. Doing so offers a new view of the processes by which legislators placed non-white and non-English speaking people outside of national belonging.