ABSTRACT
It is 28 years since Einar and Eva Haugen introduced me to Tove in the restaurant of the University of Copenhagen during the 1972 AILA (Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée) Conference. We subsequently met at numerous conferences, remained in contact through correspondence and email, and in 1994 to our delight, she and Robert spent several months in our department as visiting scholars. Right from the first encounter, I realized that we had a great deal in common in that we were both bilinguals. This in itself is hardly anything special since, as we all know, more than half of the world’s population is bilingual. But we both regarded bilinguals as a special category of people who bear a responsibility for the welfare and rights of other bilinguals. Exactly what that entailed was probably what we didn’t agree on entirely but had many opportunities to discuss on various occasions. I certainly learned from Tove that our obligation to other bilinguals extended to political activism in support of minority rights and not just the dissemination of research results as part of advocacy.
