Last October 29th, Louis-Jean Calvet, passed away. He was a Tunisian-born sociolinguist (Tunis, 1942), where he lived until he was 18 years old, and where he also passed, at 83. Calvet began his academic and research career in the René Descartes-Sorbonne University, where he founded the Sociolinguistics Laboratoryand the Plurilinguismes magazine, in that very university. But it is in the University Aix-en-Provence where he really bult a name as a sociolinguist, and were he continued his academic activities until his retirement. Beginning in his first publications, Louis-Jean has studied the relations between languages, politics, power and the colonial discourse along with linguistics (Linguistique et colonialism, a cutting-edge essay originally published in 1974). He was an academician key in the foundation of the francophone critical sociolinguistics and engaged in the creation of new was to study the linguistic practices in societies. He is also an author of L’Histoire de l’écriture, Roland Barthes, une biographie; La Guerre des langues (1987), Les Voix de la ville(1994), Les Politiques linguistiques (1995), among other essays. He has been awarded the Sociolinguists Worlwide Award n 2012 and the Prix Georges Dumezil from the Académie Française for his book La Méditerranée, mer de nos langues. This way, a whole stage of the French-speaking intellectual history on sociolinguistics closes. A history that Louis-Jean built in a brilliant way, expanding a social reflection on languages around the world, particularly from his field work on the Magreb and specially in Tunisia—his home country—a place he was really close to—and, of course, in Sub-Saharan Africa.
A good memory of Louis-Jean in that seminar which I had the fortune to attend in the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2001, hosted by Luisa M. Rojo.
