Prof Robert Phillipson

Robert Phillipson taught for many years at the University of Roskilde, Denmark, which has specialised in multi-disciplinary, student-centred learning. He is currently a Professor at Copenhagen Business School. Among his books are Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 1992) and English-only Europe? Challenging Language Policy (Routledge, 2003). His research interests include the role of English in globalisation, linguistic neoimperialism, language rights, macro-sociolinguistics and language pedagogy. Several articles are available for downloading from his website, among them 'English, a cuckoo in the European higher education nest of languages?', published in the European Journal of English Studies, 2006. The website is accessible either in Danish or English.

Presentation

English, Panacea or Pandemic?

Exclusively English-medium instruction represents monolingual myopia, complicity in linguistic neoimperialism, and historical amnesia. The pre-eminence of Western science, in our unstable, inequitable, militarised world, is recent. Contact between China, India and Arabia flourished for two millennia, with translations (between Chinese, Arabic and Sanskrit) in many scholarly fields. Buddhism triggered much of this intellectual traffic. Christianity has likewise been integral to the spread of European/American values and languages worldwide. Evangelisation persists, often covertly as western ‘education’ and TESOL, in symbiosis with the secular gospel of consumerist, corporate-driven globalisation. Former colonies have retained the language of colonisation for elite formation and higher education, under the influence of foreign ‘aid’ and World Bank policies. European countries that consolidated ‘national’ languages as languages of instruction at all levels of education are currently under pressure to accord more space to English. The term ‘domain loss’ (referring to an increased use of English in research publication, and as the medium of instruction for higher education, business etc) ignores agency in the ‘linguistic capital dispossession’ of continental European languages. The European Union is in principle committed to maintaining linguistic diversity, but whether attempts to establish a norm of ‘parallel competence’ in English and in Danish/Swedish/Finnish in Nordic universities will be achieved is an open question. Ensuring balanced cohabitation with additive (as opposed to subtractive) English is a real challenge for European higher education, as it is elsewhere in the world. Policies for strengthening competence in English must be one dimension of maintaining cultural and linguistic diversity, locally and globally, and resisting an unsustainable capitalist world ‘order’.