Although islands are not an unfamiliar context in language policy and planning (LPP) research due to the diversity and complexity of their linguistic landscapes, studies on island LPP remain fragmented. Islands have often been treated as special cases of land rather than as islands within LPP scholarship. This review therefore examines LPP studies that focus exclusively on sovereign island states to identify the distinctive architectures and challenges of these unique contexts. We followed PRISMA approach to analyse 710 LPP studies on sovereign island states published in Web of Science and Scopus (2006-2025). Three concerns were identified: uneven representation between geographical regions in terms of coverage in the literature; the limited explanatory power of conventional LPP frameworks in complex island ecologies; and an inadequate recognition of the role of language planning in Small Island Developing States (SIDS). We advocate adopting the relational, ‘glocal’ perspective to enrich current LPP frameworks and better capture the complex realities island states face today.
Jiang et al. (Tue,) studied this question.