The study of language policy and language planning may be firmly located within that part of linguistics which has been termed ‘applied sociolinguistics’. Many discussions of policy and planning implicitly suggest that the publication of a spate of basic reference works on these topics in the late 1960s and 1970s (e.g. Haugen 1968; Fishman, Ferguson & Das Gupta 1968; Neustupný 1970; Rubin & Jernudd 1971) marks the birth of these activities. However, language policy and related attention to language questions and problems have been ongoing concerns throughout much of recorded human history. What the publications of the 1960s and 1970s mark is the systematic attention to these issues in emerging postcolonial societies and the implicit claim by linguistics that its practitioners are suitably qualified to attend to such applied language matters. Although they are obviously closely intertwined, it is useful to distinguish between language policy and language planning. The latter concerns any sort of decision-making about language and language-related issues whereas language policy relates to statements about the use(s) of language(s). Such statements may take the form of official pronouncements (e.g. articulations within national constitutions, ‘language laws’) or they may take the form of customary practice. There are numerous examples to show that force of customary practice may be stronger than official pronouncements, especially when a society lacks the infrastructure to support official statements of language policy. As the terms have been most commonly used, questions of language policy and planning arise in multilingual societies, but it is important to note that language issues also arise in so-called monolingual states. For example, a major concern in Norway has been to unify two varieties of written language, Nynorsk and Bokmål, into a single standard (Haugen 1968). Most of the world’s states are multilingual, in the sense that more than one language is spoken within national boundaries. Much of the relevant literature over the past three decades concerns language choice in such countries. The field of language planning is often discussed as if it were based on coherently articulated theories or a unity approach. In fact, however, the different interweaving of historical, social and political background factors makes each language planning case study unique. It is certainly true that there is no ‘theory of language planning’ which may be directly applied in any case. As noted above, discussions of language planning most often focus on official and national status, but — like language policy — the term can be more broadly used to refer to decisions about language in any arena. A further distinction is often made in discussions of language planning between concerns of policy vs. cultivation (Neustupný 1970), or between status planning and corpus planning (Kloss 1969), and less frequently between external and internal planning. Although the above distinctions are not precisely interchangeable, the first of each pair relates to questions of language allocation and use, and the latter to the form of language(s). Status planning usually involves a proposed change in the existing status relations among languages; it has to do with perceptions of power and prestige of languages and the groups speaking those languages. Corpus planning, on the other hand, is closely related to matters of standardization, correctness and, occasionally, purism. It is sometimes assumed that there is a correlation between corpus planning and the so-called historic nations and between status planning and postcolonial nations. Such correlations are patently false. All of the historic nations engage in some degree of status planning if only with regard to a policy applicable to the language(s) of guest workers. Most postcolonial states need to make decisions about both language allocation and about language form (e.g. Indonesia, The Philippines, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea). Language standardization concerns the establishment and promulgation of language norms. These norms typically concern issues of ‘correctness’ in matters of orthography, word choice, and usage. In this regard, language standardization is closely associated with linguistic prescription. The term codification is occasionally used interchangeably with standardization, especially when the focus is on a previously unwritten language. It is worth making the point explicitly that standardization seems to be a concern of written languages exclusively, and many groups first encounter the relevant issues during the transition from pre-literate to literate status. The question of standardization is part of language planning insofar as it involves choices about the form of the standard language and is also part of language policy in that the status of ‘standard language’ can only be attained when the variety has been accepted by the community. Such acceptance may or may not rely on institutional pronouncements (e.g. from language academies or national departments of education), but there must be institutional support for the standard. The paper then continues with a more detailed address of language choice, standardization and the social context of policy decisions. The overriding conclusion to the present discussion seems to be that language problems, ranging from questions of language choice to language standardization, are in some important measure political issues. Future research on this topic should seek to elucidate further the links between language and identity, the extent to which such links are available for manipulation by bureaucracies and the extent to which status relations among languages can be similarly manipulated. This would require a renewed dialogue between sociolinguists and contemporary social theory (as argued by Williams 1992). Finally, and as a result of this dialogue, language planners should direct their attention to future-oriented and predictive models of development (cf. Laitin 1992).