If the establishment of the Académie française, the promotion of Hebrew in Palestine, the American feminist movement's campaign against sex-bias in language, and the Ethiopian mass literacy campaign exemplify language planning, then language planning is directed toward a variety of ends and encompasses a variety of means. What characteristics do these examples, and by extension all instances of language planning, share? There is no single, universally accepted definition of language planning. Indeed, there is even disagreement as to what term should be used to denote the activity.

Language planning is not the first term to appear in the literature. Perhaps the first term to appear in the literature was language engineering (Miller 1950). This has been used far more often than glottopolitics (Hall 1951), language development (Noss 1967), or language regulation (Gorman 1973). Language policy sometimes appears as a synonym for language planning but more often it refers to the goals of language planning. Jernudd and Neustupný (1986) have proposed the term language management but it is too soon to know if this will catch on. Of all the terms in use today, language planning is the most popular. It is found in the titles of a newsletter (Language Planning Newsletter), a journal (Language Problems and Language Planning), at least five collections of articles (Rubin and Jernudd 1971a; Rubin and Shuy 1973; Fishman 1974a; Rubin, Jernudd, Das Gupta, Fishman, and Ferguson 1977; and Cobarrubias and Fishman 1983), and a major bibliography on the topic (Rubin and Jernudd 1977).