[Unplanned] Language Policy and Planning

Naturally enough, the field of language planning, as its name suggests, has concentrated its efforts on the description and practice of planned language development. This is after all its raison d'être, to provide future oriented, problem-solving language-change strategies to meet particular language needs. This orientation means that language planning is one of the key descriptive topics in applied linguistics, bringing together as it does theory from a variety of disciplines and putting that into practice. Grabe and Kaplan (1992) estimate that the applied linguistics aspects of language policy and planning make up one of four categories that accounts for about 45 percent of the items published in this field.