This program addresses the issues affecting the policies and statuses of different languages, particularly in multicultural societies. By identifying the notion of language policy as the foundational issue of the program, we intend to avoid delimiting the scope of inquiry that might accrue with the use of other terms current in the general disciplinary area. Those terms and subdisciplines include (besides language policy and planning): language maintenance, language death, language loss, language abandonment, language preference, language prestige, language loyalty, language switching, language shift, language spread, language suppression, language conflict, and so on. All these subdisciplines are subsumed by the general label `language policy studies'; they comprise the topics and approaches that are central to the program's interests; but no one of them is regarded as of pre-eminent theoretical significance. What further unites these subdisciplines, however, beyond their distinct ways of addressing language status, is their necessary attention to questions of choice, control, and rights. At one level or another (e.g., at that of the individual, or the ethnic community, or the nation), questions of choice (its degrees of freedom, and its exercise by the individual as distinct from the collective), and of control and of rights, are recurrently involved in each of these subdisciplines. It is for that reason that Choice, Control and Rights are singled out for emphasis in the program's subtitle.