The world record for the longest time taken to form a government following national elections is held by Belgium. Belgium’s political leaders were unable to form a ruling coalition after general elections in 2010, leaving the country with no government for a record-breaking 541 days. At the heart of this crisis was the question of language. Efforts to form a coalition foundered along linguistic lines, as Flemish-speaking and French-speaking politicians disagreed on measures to accommodate the country’s two distinct linguistic groups. While this may have been the worst language crisis in Belgium’s history, it was certainly not the first. In 1968 proposals to extend the French-speaking section of the Flemish University of Louvain caused the conflict between the language groups to erupt into riots, and brought down the government. And in recent years, disputes over the rights of French speakers in Flemish areas have escalated into ‘language wars’, which have prompted some commentators to declare the country ‘finished’.1 Such seemingly intractable language disputes highlight the importance of language policy. Language matters, because feelings about language run high, and because disputes concerning language can have dramatic consequences. All over the world, questions of language attract interest, concern, debate, and sometimes conflict. Ongoing struggles over the status of Kurdish in Turkey or the use of Tibetan in Tibet remind us of the enormous significance minority groups attach to the use of their own language. In the UK we see increasing discussion of the language rights of immigrants, and growing efforts to revive or maintain languages such as Welsh, Gaelic, Manx, and Cornish. At the same time, formerly colonized countries, particularly within Africa, grapple with the political implications of continuing to use the languages of colonial powers, or with difficult questions of how to accommodate the large number of local languages spoken in their territories. And indigenous communities the world over face an uphill battle to preserve their traditional languages from ‘extinction’. Language policy is a global matter and, across the planet, questions of language confront us with an immense range of issues and concerns.