Abstract：Implicit language policy is a language policy that has no explicit text or discourse support, but is characterized as a certain practical mechanism in language life. Through analysis of the term, we find that: (1) Language ideology cannot be regarded as an implicit policy, as any language policy must have a substantive mechanism that can be attached to; (2) A micro-language policy is in terms of the level and scale of the policy, which can be explicit in form, thus unnecessarily an implicit language policy; (3) A covert language policy can have explicit legal texts, though the policy intentions are deliberately obscured, so it is not equivalent to implicit language policy; (4) Explicitness and implicitness constitute a continuum, and many language policies are actually between the two ends.
