Dr Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, guest researcher at the Department of Languages and Culture, University of Roskilde, Denmark and visiting professor at Åbo Akademi University, Department of Education, Vasa, Finland, had a bilingual upbringing in Finnish and Swedish in officially bilingual Finland. She has been actively involved with minorities’ struggle for language rights for over five decades. Her main research interests are in linguistic human rights, linguistic genocide, linguicism (linguistically argued racism), bilingualism and multilingual education, linguistic imperialism and the subtractive spread of English, support for endangered languages, and the relationship between linguistic and cultural diversity and biodiversity. She was the Linguapax Award recipient and the Carl Axel Gottlund Award recipient, both in 2003.

She has written and/or edited around fifty books and monographs and around 400 book chapters and scientific articles in over thirty languages. She is on editorial boards of a dozen scientific journals. She has had visiting attachments at many universities around the world. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas has extensive teaching experience, mostly at universities but also elementary and special education (1 year of each) and vocational education (2 years while collecting materials for her first PhD) and Steiner school, both bilingual. She has worked for decades with Indigenous education (e.g. the Saami in all Nordic countries) and advised and trained educational authorities and politicians in many countries about multilingual education. She has worked extensively with and written for OSCE (High Commissioner on National Minorities), UNESCO, UN, and the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. She lives on a small ecological/organic farm in Denmark with husband Robert Phillipson.