| Linguapax
Prize
Rules
1. The Linguapax Prizes are awarded every
year by the Linguapax Institute.
2. The prizes are awarded to linguists, researchers,
professors and members of the civil society in acknowledgement
of their outstanding work in the field linguistic diversity
and/or multilingual education. Nominations of people having
contributed to improve the linguistic situation of a community
or country will be specially appreciated.
3. The nominations for the Linguapax Prizes
must be sent to the secretariat of the Linguapax Institute
along with a biographical note of the candidate. The nominations
will remain confidential among the members of the jury.
4. The jury of the Linguapax Prizes will be
formed by the members of the Advisory Committee of the Linguapax
Institute.
5. The Linguapax prizes can be declared void.
The jury's decision will be final.
6. The Linguapax Prize will be made public
on February 21st of every year, International
Mother Language Day.
7. The awardee will be granted the
amount of 3,000 €
Linguapax
Prize 2007
Maya Khemlani David has conducted numerous studies on language maintenance and language shift in different minority communities of Malaysia (Sindhi, Punjabi, Nepali, Portuguese, Tamil and others) that are present in different territories of her country, as well as in London and Singapore. The contributions of Maya Khemlani David over the past 30 years have become a point of reference and have made a significant impact on the Malaysian society as a whole, notably through her important role in the Movement for the linguistic rights of the minority language communities of Southeast Asia.
Linguapax Prize 2006
 She
is a native Ingano woman in Colombia, South America, widow
of the late Ingano shaman, Don Roberto, who has tirelessly
worked to foster mutlilingual education, involving Ingano
language, in the trying circumstances of abject poverty
and an ongoing year civil war. With the support of the Amazon
Conservation Team, she has promoted the study of the Inga
language through a school, Escuela Yachaicury, she and her
community created in the remote hamlet of Yurayaco, Caquetá
department, Colombia.
The Yachaicury School has been formally
recognized by Colombia’s Ministry of Education. In
addition to her work with the school, she also produces
an Inga language radio show that is broadcast in the region;
the radio station is wholly indigenous-run and is also out
of Yurayaco. Further, she is a stalwart of the Ingano cultural
renaissance that is taking place well below the radar in
the foothills of the Colombian Amazon, having been one of
the guiding lights leading to the creation of the Inga-self-governing
association involving five Ingano communities.
Linguapax
Prize 2005
| Maurice
Tadadjeu (University of Yaounde I, Camerun) |
 Maurice
Tadadjeu mastered in Linguistics at Georgetown University
in Washington DC and obtained a PhD in Linguistics at the
University of Southern California (Los Angeles, USA). He
has served at the University of Yaounde since September
1977. Professor Tadadjeu specializes in Language Planning
and Mother Tongue Education and has been the driving force
behind the PROPELCA project which, since 1978, has successfully
implemented mother tongue education programs. Maurice Tadadjeu
is currently Chairman of the National Association of Cameroon
Language Committees (NACALCO) a federation of 77 local language
development associations. In 1999 he launched an ambitious
project for the basic Standardization of unwritten African
Languages (BASAL). Maurice Tadadjeu has published extensively
(mainly in French) on language planning and mother tongue
education. Outside the academic and research world, Professor
Tadadjeu has been a very active Panafricanist: he created
the first National Club of the African Union Organization
in Africa and he has published several books on the African
economic and Social-political integration. On May 2001,
Professor Tadadjeu was elected as the first Delegate General
of the African Civil Society Organization (ACSO) endeavoring
to promote a popular participation in the African Union.
Linguapax Prize 2004
| Fernand
de Varennes (Murdoch
University, Australia) |
|
He is a former Director of the Asia-Pacific Centre
for Human Rights and the Prevention of Ethnic Conflict
and the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Asia-Pacific
Journal on Human Rights and the Law. Dr de Varennes
is recognised as one of the world's leading legal
experts on language rights and has written two seminal
works on this topic: Language, Minorities and
Human Rights (1996) and A Guide to the Rights
of Minorities and Language (2001). His publications
have been translated into 17 languages. He has lectured
worldwide on language rights, especially in Europe
and Asia, and collaborated with the OSCE High Commissioner
on National Minorities in preparing The Oslo Recommendations
regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities
and the Lund Recommendations regarding Political Participation
of National Minorities. Dr de Varennes has worked
with numerous international organisations such as
the United Nations’ Working Group on the Rights
of Minorities and UNESCO. He is Senior (Non-Resident)
Research Associate at the European Centre for Minority
Issues in Flensburg, Germany, on the advisory board
of numerous research centres and journals. He has
held the prestigious Tip O’Neill Peace Fellowship
at INCORE (Initiative on Conflict Resolution and Ethnicity)
in Derry, Northern Ireland and has published five
books and over fifty scientific articles and reports
|
| Joshua
Fishman (Yeshiva University/Stanford University) |
|
He is regarded as being probably the world’s
finest sociolinguist in the second half of the 20th
century. Indeed he could be said to be one of the
founding fathers of that discipline. His academic
career as a teacher, a researcher and a theoretician
is long and distinguished. He has been associated
with many universities and research centres and is
currently Distinguished University Research Professor,
Social Sciences, Emeritus at Yeshiva University, New
York. He has authored or edited over 60 books and
has contributed hundreds of articles to various publications.
Over
his long career he has paid particular attention to
lesser used and endangered languages. Those working
for linguistic diversity will probably think most
readily of two seminal works of his, Reversing
Language Shift and Can threatened languages
be saved?, published in 1991 and 2001 respectively.
In these he presents us with his Graded Intergenerational
Disruption Scale [GIDS] with which language shift
can be measured.
|
Linguapax Prize 2003
| Aina
Moll |
|
 Aina Moll graduated in Romance Philology at the University
of Barcelona. She is a member of the Institute of
Catalan Studies (Philological Section) and holds a
chair in French at the Institute Joan Alcover in Palma.
She collaborated in the Diccionari Català-Valencià-Balear
(10 volumes) started in 1900 and completed in 1962
that has become an indispensable work of reference
for Catalan philology. She also carried out linguistic
surveys for the Atlas Lingüístic de la
Península Ibérica and has been director
of the collections of the Moll publishing company.
She is the author of the book La nostra llengua
and has published hundreds of articles on the Catalan
language and language planning. Aina Moll was Head
of Language Policy of the Government of Catalonia
(1980-88) that prepared the first Law on Language
Policy of the Autonomous Government of Catalonia and
coordinated the Language Planning Campaign in the
Balearic Islands (1990-1995). She was a founder member
of the Balearic Cultural Work (Obra Cultural Balear),
member of the Social Council for the Catalan Language
and coordinated area 1 of the Second International
Congress on the Catalan Language. She has been awarded
the Cross of Saint George of the Generalitat of Catalonia
(1988) and the Ramon Llull award of the Government
of the Balearic Islands (1997).
|
| Tove
Skutnabb-Kangas |
|
 Tove Skutnabb-Kangas is Finnish, with doctorates from
the Universities of Helsinki and Roskilde, Denmark.
She is a prolific author on bilingualism, minority
education, linguistic human rights, and many aspects
of language policy. Her publications have been translated
into 17 languages. Her most significant recent book
is Linguistic genocide in education - or worldwide
diversity and human rights? (2000). Tove Skutnabb-Kangas
is Vice-President of Terralingua, Partnerships for
Linguistic and Biological Diversity, whom she represented
at the UN summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg
in August 2002. She has worked as a consultant for
UNESCO, for whom she wrote Sharing a world of
difference. The earth's linguistic, cultural
and biological diversity, to be published in
six languages in 2003. She has lectured worldwide,
and collaborated with the OSCE High Commissioner on
National Minorities in preparing The Hague Recommendations
regarding the education rights of national minorities
(1997). She works actively with many minority language
groups. |
|
Bartomeu
Melià was born in Porreres (Balearic Islands)
in 1932. He has spent a great part of his life in
Paraguay where he has carried out extensive research
on Guarani ethnohistory and ethnolinguistics through
fieldwork in that country and in Brasil and Bolivia
as well. He has a Ph.D in Religious Siences from the
University of Strasbourg and is a member of the Paris
Society of Americanists. He is also honorary president
of the Center for Anthropological Studies at the Catholic
University of Asunción (Paraguay). He has been
director of the journal Acción of Asunción
during two periods (1969-75; 1993-99). He is a member
of the National Commission on Bilingualism of the
Ministery of Education and Cult of the Republic of
Paraguay and works as a consultant of the Program
on Intercultural and Bilingual Education, of the Teko
Guaraní (Assembly of the Guaraní people
in Bolivia) since 1990. Among his most recent publications:
Elogio de la lengua guaraní; contextos para
una educación bilingüe en el Paraguay
(1995), El Paraguay inventado (1997), Pueblos
indígenas en el Paraguay. Demografía
histórica y análisis de los resultados
del Censo nacional de Población y Viviendas,
1992 (1997), Ñane ñe'fi paraguái:
Paraguay bilingüe: Políticas lingüísticas
y educación bilingüe (1997), Antonio
Ruiz de Montoya, Vocabulario de la lengua guaraní
(1640) (2000).
Professor
Jerzy (George) Smolicz was born in Poland and educated
at Edinburgh and Oxford Universities. He holds a personal
Chair of Education at the University of Adelaide in
South Australia, where he is also the Director of
the University's Centre for Intercultural Studies
and Multicultural Education (CISME). Professor Smolicz
has been active in advising both State and Federal
governments on policy formation in relation to linguistic
and cultural pluralism and its implementation in the
Australian education system. He was a senior consultant
for the preparation of the Review of Multicultural
and Migrant Education and chaired the South Australian
Task Force on Multiculturalism that was responsible
for the Report, Education for Cultural Democracy,
which became the blueprint for successive South Australian
Governments in the area of multiculturalism. Currently,
Professor Smolicz is a member of the Council for Multicultural
Australia (CMA); Chairman of the SA Ministerial Advisory
Committee on Multicultural Education; member of the
Social Science Network of the Australian National
Commission for UNESCO, as well as of the Asian Association
of Social Science Research Councils (AASSREC). He
holds a visiting professorship at the Institute of
Political Sciences at the Polish Academy of Sciences,
as well as an Honorary Professorship at the University
of Santo Tomas at Manila in the Philippines He is
the author of a number of books, monographs and articles
on linguistic and cultural pluralism in education
from a comparative perspective. His work on language
as a core value of culture has been published in Asia
and Europe in several languages, including French,
German, Polish, Italian and Filipino.