My interest in the topic of this Handbook was whetted by conversations during weekly coffee meetings in Jerusalem with Robert Cooper who was at the time writing his seminal book on language policy (Cooper, R. L. Reference Cooper1989: Language Planning and Social Change, Cambridge University Press.) It took shape during a resident fellowship from 1991–1992 spent at the National Foreign Language Center (then part of the Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC) under the directorship of Richard D. Lambert. There, it was nurtured in discussions with Lambert and with his associate directors Richard Brecht and Ronald Walton and with other visiting scholars at the Center including John Trim and Elana Shohamy. Shohamy and I continued this debate when we returned to Israel, resulting in our drafting (at the request of the Minister of Education) of a policy for language education in Israel. We also wrote a book on the topic (Spolsky, B., and Shohamy, E. Reference Spolsky and Shohamy1999, The Languages of Israel: policy, Ideology and Practice, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters) where the theoretical model was set out. My academic interests earlier focused on educational linguistics and language testing, continued to move more and more to language policy, encouraged by regular visits to Washington, both to the National Foreign Language Center after it moved to the University of Maryland and to the Center for Advanced Study of Language when it was first established there. After my retirement from Bar-Ilan University in 2000, I published two monographs on the topic with Cambridge University Press and was easily persuaded by the Press to start work on this Handbook.

The experience of editing reminded me of the many problems that academics face in keeping to deadlines – ill-health, operations and family deaths, demolition of departments, a failed major grant proposal, all led to delays and withdrawals (two critical). I am thus deeply grateful to the contributors who managed, in spite of other professional and personal pressures, to produce the chapters included here. I am also grateful to the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington DC (especially its past president, Donna Swain, and incoming president, Terrence Wiley) which provided me with a Charles Ferguson Fellowship (what could be more appropriate than time to finish editing a book about the field he helped establish!).

The idea of this Handbook was suggested to me by Andrew Winnard of Cambridge University Press, and my deepest gratitude is due to him and to the other people who helped in the editing process: Sarah Green who was an efficient and friendly editor, Jodie Barnes who supervised production of the book, Penny Wheeler who managed the challenging task of copy-editing, and Sue Lightfoot who produced the excellent indexes. I also want to acknowledge the assistance of Google and the Library of Congress Catalog in finding answers to editing queries, thus saving me the need to write to contributors and the extra time it would have added to the editing process.

There are gaps left in coverage – in particular, we lost two planned chapters, one on language cultivation and one on treatment of non-standard varieties, but both issues are dealt with in other chapters. The treatment is biased towards the Western perspectives of most of the writers, their common assumption that even important topics can be studied scientifically and without postulating anonymous conspiracies, and their professionally acquired sense of the significance of language and the desirability of maintaining language diversity. Reviewers will have the chance to point out other failings, and future editors to build more balanced or more exciting collections. But the field is now well launched.

The statistics in Reference LewisTable 6.1 are used by permission, © SIL (Ethnologue 16th edition, 2009).