When I started to write this book, I had two principal aims. First, I hoped to present a general overview of language planning. I wanted to define the field, relate it to other fields, outline its scope, and offer generalizations which would relate language-planning goals, procedures, and outcomes to one another. Second, I hoped to relate language planning to public policy more generally and to social change. If these goals have been to some degree attained, it is because I was able to rely on the pioneering work of many scholars, in particular Jyotirindra Das Gupta, Charles A. Ferguson, Joshua A. Fishman, Einar Haugen, Björn Jernudd, Heinz Kloss, Jiří Neustupný, Clifford H. Prator, and Joan Rubin. My intellectual debt to them is great. Without their work, this book would not have been possible.

A writer's debts are not only intellectual. To Joshua Fishman I owe a great deal beyond the academic foundations which his work provides. In 1966, he hired me fresh from graduate school to work with him for two years on a major sociolinguistic project, funded by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and ultimately published as Bilingualism in the Barrio (Fishman, Cooper, and Ma 1971). Later, in 1972, he invited me to join him in Jerusalem for two years on a Ford Foundation project, subsequently published as The Spread of English (Fishman, Cooper, and Conrad 1977).