For many years Denmark has had a reputation for being laissez-faire in language matters. There is no explicit language legislation, and the Danish Language Council has mainly descriptive functions. However, there is a powerful standard language ideology, and in other societal domains such as education or immigration, language is heavily regulated. In this paper, I shall first give the background, i.e. the situation for the Danish language and other languages in Denmark, and then zoom in on the debate about the pros and cons of a language act supplemented with specific questions related to education or immigration to grasp the de facto language policies at play.