Robert Phillipson

On 21 February 2010, Phillipson was awarded the Linguapax Prize along with Miquel Siguan i Soler. The Linguapax Institute describes them as "renowned advocates of multilingual education as a factor of peace and of linguistic rights against cultural and linguistic homogenization processes".

Robert Henry Lawrence Phillipson (born 18 March 1942 in Gourock, Scotland) is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. He is best known for his seminal work on linguistic imperialism and language policy in Europe.

Phillipson was born in Scotland in 1942. He received his B.A. in 1964 and his M.A. in 1967, both in Modern Languages (French and German) and Law, from the University of Cambridge. He obtained his second M.A. in Linguistics and English Language Teaching from Leeds University in 1969. He earned his Ph.D., with distinction, in Education from the University of Amsterdam in 1990. He worked for the British Council from 1964 to 1973. He was associate professor in the Department of Languages and Culture at Roskilde University in Denmark from 1973 to 2000. He has been on the faculty of Copenhagen Business School since 2000. He also taught at the University of Copenhagen (1973-1984). He was Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Education at the University of London (1983), the University of Melbourne in Australia (1994), the Central Institute of Indian Languages in Mysore (1995), the University of Pecs in Hungary (1996) and the Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge (2005). He currently lives with his wife, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, in Sweden.