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Robert Phil­lipson

Emeritus

Subjects
Language EU Human rights Learning

Primary research areas

Eng­lish in the mod­ern world, reas­ons for its ex­pan­sion, and im­plic­a­tions for oth­er lan­guages
Lin­guist­ic im­per­i­al­ism, lan­guage and power, post­co­lo­ni­al and neoim­per­i­al lan­guages
Lan­guage rights, lin­guist­ic hu­man rights, lin­guist­ic justice
Lan­guage policy in EU in­sti­tu­tions and in the in­ter­ac­tion between the EU and mem­ber states
Lan­guage ped­agogy, the learn­ing of Eng­lish

My pro­file

I am a Professor emeritus at the Department of Management, Society and Communication.

My books on language policy, language rights, linguistic human rights, and language in education have been published in a dozen countries. I am best known for Linguistic Imperialism (1992), published by Oxford University Press, UK, and also published in India and China, and in translation into Arabic and Japanese. I have strong links to colleagues worldwide, many of whom are critical scholars working for greater social justice in education and the wider society. The Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights, edited with Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (Wiley, 2023) has chapters written by 62 contributors, from all continents, with strong representation of Indigenous peoples. Most of them are people we have collaborated with, and who have become personal friends. This book was shortlisted for the annual prize of the British Association of Applied Linguistics in 2024.

I have lecture in 50 countries, among them Australia, Indonesia, Korea, Mauritius, South Africa, Turkey, the UK, and in most continental European countries. I have also, with Tove, taught PhD courses on language policy and language rights in Denmark (CBS, Aalborg), Hungary (Szeged), China (Shanghai), and India (Hyderabad).

I was for a decade an expert assessing EU research funding applications in the area of language, culture and European identity.

I tried for many years to induce the Danish government to take language policy seriously, by writing in newspapers, and organizing conferences that made recommendations for strengthening the learning of languages other than English. Language policy in Denmark has sadly been left to market forces. As a result there are few Danes with competence in several European languages, or other major languages, among them Arabic and Chinese.

In 2010 I was awarded the UNESCO Linguapax prize. In 2024 I was awarded the President’s Prize of TESOL international association (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) in Tampa, Florida, USA.
 

Find Robert Phillipson's full list of publications on the CBS Research Portal

Se­lec­ted pub­lic­a­tions

Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove & Robert Phillipson, eds. 2023, Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights, Wiley-Blackwell.

Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove, Phillipson, Robert & Dunbar, Robert (2019). Is Nunavut education criminally inadequate? An analysis of current policies for Inuktut and English in education, international and national law, linguistic and cultural genocide and crimes against humanity. Nunavut, 25 April 2019. 83 pages. Download from https://www.tunngavik.com/files/2019/04/NuLinguicideReportFINAL.pdf

Phillipson, Robert. La domination de l'anglais: un défi pour l'Europe. Paris: Libre & Solidaire, March 2019

Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove and Robert Phillipson (eds) 2017. Language Rights. Four volumes. Routledge.

Bunce, Pauline, Robert Phillipson, Vaughan Rapatahana, and Ruanni. F. Tupas (eds) 2016. Why English? Confronting the Hydra. Multilingual Matters.

Phillipson, Robert 2016. Myths and realities of ‘global' English. Language Policy. On-line from June 2016.

Phillipson, Robert 2015. English as threat or opportunity in European Higher Education. In English-Medium Instruction in European Higher Education: English in Europe, ed. S. Dimova, A. K. Hultgren, and C. Jensen. Mouton de Gruyter, 19-42.

Phillipson, Robert 2015. Linguistic imperialism of and in the European Union. In Revisiting the European Union as Empire, ed. Hartmut Behr and Yannis A. Stivachtis. Routledge, 134-163.

Phillipson, Robert. English-only Europe? Challenging language policy. Routledge, 2003.

Phillipson, Robert. Linguistic imperialism. Oxford University Press, 1992.