Resumen de Guest editor’s preface: special issue of Eastern and Northern European language policies and strategies: de jure and de facto approaches

István Jánk

• European countries have set themselves different language policy goals and achieved them in different ways. The goal of this volume is to present these language policies and their impacts, covering areas such as status and corpus planning, standardisation, codification, terminology, plain language, and the relationship between different languages and language varieties. The edited issue is based on presentations delivered at the International Conference on European Language Policies and Strategies, which brought together language policy experts from 14 European countries to present the current language policy situation and language strategy activities in their respective countries. Besides the need for a professional debate on the topic, the background to the initiative was the fact that several European countries, including Hungary, do not have an explicit language policy or language strategy. The focus is on the differences between de facto and de jure language policies within and across countries, describing the language policy context and language strategy measures in Germany, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Denmark, Norway and Hungary. The primary aim is therefore not to cover the European continent but to present and compare language policies in countries with often very different social and political contexts.