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Language policy is an issue of critical importance in the world today. In this introduction, Bernard Spolsky explores many debates at the forefront of language policy: ideas of correctness and bad language; bilingualism and multilingualism; language death and efforts to preserve endangered languages; language choice as a human and civil right; and language education policy. Through looking at the language practices, beliefs and management of social groups from families to supra-national organizations, he develops a theory of modern national language policy and the major forces controlling it, such as the demands for efficient communication, the pressure for national identity, the attractions of (and resistance to) English as a global language, and the growing concern for human and civil rights as they impinge on language. Two central questions asked in this wide-ranging survey are of how to recognize language policies, and whether or not language can be managed at all.

A major difference between first and second language acquisition is in the degree of variation in the levels of proficiency attained by learners. Among the factors proposed to account for this variation are method, age, aptitude and attitude. In a typical language learning situation, there are a number of people whose attitude to each other can be significant: the learner, the teacher, the learner's peers and parents, and the speakers of the language. One of the most important attitudinal factors is the attitude of the learner to the language and to its speakers. Use of an instrument that compares a subject's attitude to speakers of his native language and to speakers of a foreign language made possible a consideration of the nature and influence of this attitude. The extent to which foreign students newly arrived at American universities showed a greater desire to be like speakers of English than like speakers of their own language was significantly correlated with their proficiency in English. It is clear that the social role of language cannot be overlooked in the development of a theory of second language acquisition.

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After nearly two centuries of contact with Europeans, the Māori language of New Zealand was, by the 1960s, threatened with extinction. Accompanying a movement for ethnic revival, a series of grassroots regeneration efforts that established adult, preschool, and autonomous school immersion programs has over the past two decades increased substantially the number of Māori who know and use their language, but this has not yet led to the reestablishment of natural intergenerational transmission. More recently, responding to growing ethnic pressures, the New Zealand government has adopted a Māori language policy and is starting to implement it. Seen in its widest social, political, and economic context, this process can be understood not as colonial language loss followed by postcolonial reversing language shift activities, but as the continuation of a long process of negotiation of accommodation between autochthonous Māori and European settlers.