Robert Phillipson
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.
Career
- BA from Cambridge, PhD from the University of Amsterdam
- Worked for the British Council for a decade before returning to academia
- Long career at Copenhagen Business School, Department of International Business Communication
- Frequent collaborator with Tove Skutnabb-Kangas on minority language rights
Published Work
- Linguistic Imperialism (1992) — the field-defining critique
- English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy (2003)
- Linguistic Imperialism Continued (2009)
- Numerous articles with Tove Skutnabb-Kangas on linguistic human rights
Influence
- Put linguistic imperialism, ELT hegemony, and native-speakerism on the applied-linguistics agenda
- Provided a standard reference for critical work on English as a global language
- His critics — including Widdowson and Pennycook — wrote some of their best-known work in reply, which is in itself a measure of influence