Robert Phillipson is a British-Danish applied linguist and Professor Emeritus at Copenhagen Business School. Before his academic career, he worked for the British Council, an experience that shaped the sharpest critique of the global English teaching enterprise the field has produced.
Phillipson's 1992 Linguistic Imperialism argued that the international spread of English, far from being neutral, has been actively promoted by state institutions (notably the British Council and USIS) in ways that systematically disadvantage other languages and their speakers. The book reframed much of applied linguistics as a critical, politicized field, and it continues to divide the profession between those who see his argument as overdue and those who see it as overstated.