Speaker: Robert Phillipson, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Biography:

Robert Phillipson is a graduate of Cambridge and Leeds Universities, UK, and has a doctorate from the University of Amsterdam. He worked in Spain, Algeria, Yugoslavia and London before settling in Denmark. He is a Professor at Copenhagen Business School. His publications include Learner language and language learning (with Færch and Haastrup, Multilingual Matters, 1984), Linguistic imperialism (Oxford University Press, 1992), Linguistic human rights: overcoming linguistic discrimination, edited with Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (Mouton de Gruyter, 1994); Language: a right and a resource, edited with Kontra, Skutnabb-Kangas and Várady (Central European University Press, 1999); Rights to language: equity, power and education (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000); and English-only Europe? Challenging language policy (Routledge, 2003). He has had attachments to universities in Australia, Hungary and India, and in 2005 was a Visiting Fellow at CRASSH, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, of the University of Cambridge. For details, see <http://www.cbs.dk/>.

Title: "How Does Linguistic Neoimperialism Sustain Global Corporate Occupation?"

Abstract:

Competence in English gives its users many inequitable advantages over speakers of other languages. Even prestigious European languages risk the dispossession of their linguistic capital through accumulation processes that dovetail with the workings of the global economy and finance (Harvey 2005a and b), media (Mattelart 2005), research and higher education (Phillipson 2006), and the increasing militarization that the imposition of US empire entails. New technologies are creating medialects (Hjarvad 2004), while the translation (big) business ensures localisation (Cronin 2003). The ‘demand’ for English in education increases worldwide without the implications for multilingual language policy formation being adequately addressed (Phillipson 2003). Unequal linguistic exchange, in mobile time and space, consolidates patterns of linguistic dominance and marginalisation, yet the processes of neoimperial linguistic occupation (which is no longer territorial) remain largely undiagnosed and unopposed: little decolonizing of the mind appears to have taken place. Theorisation and empirical verification of linguistic neoimperialism needs to develop from studies of linguistic imperialism in earlier centuries (Phillipson 1992). Language policy formation and implementation at the supranational, national and subnational levels is needed if linguistic diversity is to be sustainable, and if speakers of all languages are to enjoy linguistic human rights – and to resist mental and economic occupation.

Cronin, Michael 2003. Translation and globalization, Routledge.

Harvey David, 2005a. The new imperialism, OUP.

Harvey, David 2005b. Neoliberalism, OUP.

Hjarvad, Stig 2004. The globalization of language. How the media contribute to the spread of English and the emergence of medialects. Nordicom Information, Gothenburg 2: 75-97.

Mattelart, Armand 2005. Diversité culturelle et mondialisation, La Découverte.

Phillipson, Robert 1992. Linguistic imperialism, OUP.

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

Phillipson 2006. English – a cuckoo in the European higher education nest of languages? European Journal of English Studies.