This review aims to briefl y discuss and comment on the book Guardians of Language (Florian Coulmas, 2016). Similar to other human planning activities, actor is one of the most signifi cant variables that need to be examined in language policy making. However, for a long time, the discussion of language planning actors have been scattered across various journal articles and books. These studies are both unsystematic and rather limited in depth, most of which are merely simple reviews and classifications of actors. Different from previous studies, the author of the book carefully selects twenty individual actors in history from medieval to modern times and then focuses on their roles in cultivating and managing language as well as formulating language policy. Drawing upon the common features of the above actors, the book makes an attempt to advance a model for language planning goals with five counterparts: modernization vs. conservation, universality vs. uniqueness, unity vs.pluralism, domination vs. liberation, elitism vs. egalitarianism. In conclusion, I argue that considering the current situation in language policy research, future works involving language planning actors should not only simply focus on macroscopic or microscopic level, but also pay attention to the interactions within these two levels in order to come out with the general patterns of language policy. In addition, the ‘imaginary interview’ method adopted in this book is also worth for exploration in future endeavors.