Standard accounts of language policy and language planning tend to portray language users all too often as the 'passive receivers' of linguistic decisions taken at the higher levels of state organization.

Conversely, those who are supposed to 'live' the language policies never really appear to submissively 'implement' them, but, appropriating them, steer them in novel, unforeseen directions through their everyday language practices and their discursive perceptions and interpretations of linguistic realities. It is these dialectic processes of interaction between what is designed from above and how it is responded to from below which give shape to societies' overall patterns of multilingualism.