as the extra dimensional components of the gauge fields, after compactification. This identifies the compactification scale with the flavour breaking scale which is much much larger than the electroweak scale, making such an idea viable in principle. The extra dimensions allow simple mechanisms to align the VEVs of the flavons through a combination of Wilson lines and orbifolds, without the need for complicated alignment potentials. To illustrate the GHU mechanism, we present a simple example based on $SO(3)$ gauged family symmetry in 5d. This is the simplest choice since the adjoint representation is a real triplet representation, which is what we want for flavons. We also discuss a $SU(4)$ gauged family symmetry in 5d which is also a natural choice since it can be broken through orbifolding to $SU(3)\times U(1)$ and the broken generators are complex triplets which may have effective couplings to fermions. Finally we present a general formalism for Wilson lines and orbifolds, in any number of dimensions, including non-commutative aspects Wilson lines, which may be useful for aligning additional flavons.

The layout of the remainder of the paper is as follows. In section \[Wilson5d\] we review Wilson lines and orbifolds in 5d to show how the two 