In the past 20 years, the Plain English movement has become a recognized school of thought at the international level and also in Canada where the federal government has encouraged its growth. For that purpose, it has intervened at two levels: first, by raising the awareness of its civil servants and agencies about the need for clear and simple communications and concern for literacy issues, and, second, by developing training programs and tools to implement, as much as possible, the lessons of experience mostly drawn, in the beginning, from other jurisdictions.

As the Plain English movement was gaining an official standing as a policy in Canadian government communications in several areas, the institutional bilingualism as practised at the federal level and in some provinces led to a similar undertaking in French. In the Quebec context, although the government never made it a general policy to adopt Plain French solutions in public documents, the concern for clarity has always been very present but rather expressed as a need for administrative simplification.

In parallel, the Plain English movement made some significant inroads in the European institutions where one may now see the development of a more universal approach. As indicated in Clarity No.47, the interest for Plain English has become a multilingual affair, that is more a Plain Language endeavour. At the supranational level, the European Commission, through the "Fight the Fog" campaign, has demonstrated its willingness to remedy the problems caused by jargon and other deficiencies in many of its language groups and, most notably, among European lawyers.

The early participants in the movement to expand Plain English were the Swedes, more than 15 years ago; they took the first non-English national initiative towards plain official writing and, more importantly, plain legislative drafting. Later on, in the 90's, with the help of Plain English Campaign, the British organization and its network, Swedish, French-Canadian and Basque speakers were given a chance to appear in several international conferences to spread the word among other cultural and linguistic groups. At the national level, German and Italian legal and administrative writers did not hesitate to use the Plain Language model to outline their original processes and style of simplification, as well as their achievements in their respective jurisdictions. The French in Belgium, without being directly involved in the Plain English networks, made a valuable contribution to the Plain French research, most notably by instituting a Plain Language Committee to help simplify government writing. Lastly, France took a highly visible and official stand in 2001 in favour of Plain French in government communications with the creation of the Committee to simplify official language (COSLA). Its work and the tools it produced have raised a great deal of interest in Canada and in Quebec where research and field work had taken place for many years in some kind of cultural vacuum, without a larger frame of reference, to be used for benchmarking.