Like an extended view of language policy now provides agency to many more actors across society than authorities and linguists alone, it also takes that the dispositions these agents bring to language affairs affect language policy processes and outcomes. However, this article makes the case that language policy may also be guided, to some level, by what these societal language policy agents assert to know as facts in linguistics, regardless of the empirical precision of their knowledge. Using an analysis of qualitative data from folk linguistic inquiry on Māori language revitalisation, the article debates instances of the policy ideas and discourses of a cohort of young New Zealanders depending on what they asserted as facts about revitalisation. By bringing a folk linguistic viewpoint to language policy theory, the article claims that space should be made to accommodate the power of folk linguistic knowledge in language policy theory.