From practice to theory: the contributions of Richard B. Baldauf Jr. to the field of language policy and planning

Abstract

At the end of this introduction, there is a photograph. At first glance, it looks fairly unremarkable, but, as photos do with the passing of time, it has become an historical artefact. It is a group photo of participants in a research-planning meeting convened in 1983 by Bjorn Jernudd as a part of the project he directed at the East-West Centre, Honolulu, entitled “Modernisation and Language Development”. Included in the photo are some very eminent linguists as well as several younger academics who would become some of the most influential figures in the contemporary field of language policy and planning (LPP). In the group are, Bjorn Jernudd and Jiři V. Neustupný, two founding figures of language management theory (LMT), and others who went on to become leaders in linguistic and socio/applied linguistic research in South Asia and the Asia-Pacific, among them E. Annamalai, Terry Crowley, Anton Moeliono, and D. P. Pattanayak. Also in the photo are two colleagues who were to establish a collaboration that would play a major role in advancing the study of LPP, Richard (Dick) Baldauf and Robert (Bob) Kaplan, the co-founders of this journal (see Figure 1).