A Study of Hotspots and Trends in International Language Policy and Planning Research in the Last Decade: A Visualized Overview Based on the Scopus Database

Language policy and planning is one of the key research topics in sociolinguistics.Based on CiteSpace5.5.R2, this study analyzed 2025 original articles and conference papers on language policy and planning published between 2010 and 2019.The data were collected from the Scopus database.With an aim to clarify the development of this field and illuminate its research frontier in the past decade, this study examined key words co-occurrence, the most cited journals, the most cited literature, and the distribution of the most productive countries/regions and institutions.The results show that in the last decade,this field has presented an unbalanced development trend in terms of national/regional distribution.Contrastively, the distribution of research institutions of various regions is relatively balanced.Besides, multiple research hotspots have emerged, including language education, multilingualism, and so on.Moreover, in view of research trends, the focus of this field has gradually shifted to the micro level.