Language Rights Defenders Award

The Global Coalition for Language Rights is pleased to announce the first annual Language Rights Defenders Award. This award aims to recognize and honor individuals who demonstrate outstanding commitment to language rights. 

This year, the award is dedicated to the memory of Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, a world-renowned language rights advocate and scholar who passed away in 2023. Tove’s life demonstrates the sort of attributes, efforts, and passion we are hoping to inspire and recognize through this award. You can read more about Tove’s life and work here.  

We have assembled a panel of experts to judge the inaugural Language Rights Defenders Award. Each of them is an outstanding defender of language rights: Robert Phillipson (Denmark), Jakelin Troy (Australia), Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (Nigeria), and Miryam Yataco (Peru). You can read here for background about the judges and their distinct expertise and experience in defending language rights.  

Any individual who has demonstrated outstanding commitment to language rights can be nominated for the award, including community activists, translators, advocates, scholars, or anyone else who defends language rights.

Submissions can be made in English, Swahili, Mandarin, Spanish or French, and people may nominate themselves or others. Nominations for the Language Rights Defenders Award close on April 22nd. 

Nominations should respond to the following prompt.  

In 500 words or less, describe this person’s major contributions to defending language rights. 

When answering this question, please keep in mind the criteria that judges will use (see below). In addition to answering the question above, submissions can also include up to five links or attachments as supporting evidence. Please email your submission to: [email protected] 

Once all the nominations have been collated after April 22nd, our panel of expert judges, together with the co-chairs of the Global Coalition for Language Rights, will assess each nomination using the criteria below. Each judge will give a score between 1 and 10 for each criteria, and the co-chairs will also collectively score each nomination. 

• Commitment to defending language rights
• Impact of their work 
• Broader commitment to principles of peace, inclusion, and social justice 

If a clear winner emerges from this process, then the award will be given to that person. If not, the judges will meet to discuss a winner, choosing from among the five highest-ranked candidates. 

The winner of the first ever Language Rights Defenders Award will be announced on May 22nd, 2024.