Acknowledgments

This book is a revised and updated version of my doctoral dissertation, which I had the honour to carry out at Ulster University with the supervision of Drs Michele Gazzola, Gordon Marnoch and Brian Carey, who have guided me in the writing and with whom I had deep, interesting and sometimes challenging dialogues, which overall made me a better researcher. This project was funded under a Marie Curie scholarship, and I received additional funding from the Esperantic Studies Foundation through the Marjorie Boulton Fellowship in 2023. In addition to my PhD supervisors, a special mention also goes to Andrew Shorten and Philip McDermott, my viva voce examiners, and to Mark Fettes and Humphrey Tonkin, for helping me transform my dissertation into the manuscript you are reading today. Moreover, this work has also benefited enormously from the insights and inputs of colleagues all over the world, and for that I want to thank Yael Peled, Dave Sayers and Mattia Zeba, with whom I have had the most enriching conversations on language and justice. I am very grateful for the support and encouragement that I have received from my colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast, in particular Kevin Hearty and Leanne Henderson. I also would like to thank the magnificent CEO of the Linguistic Justice Foundation, Irene Gotera, the volunteers and the board of directors, especially Gerald Roche. Being part of this project to disseminate linguistic justice for the many has helped shape the vision for this book.

I have worked on this book during very challenging times for the world. I started at Ulster University in October 2019, full of hopes and expectations for how my academic career was going to shape up, planning ambitious fieldwork and travels to conferences in the farthest places my research allowance could allow me to go. These dreams were crushed in the wake of February 2020 and the outbreak of the pandemic of the coronavirus COVID-19: most of my doctoral work was carried out at a tiny desk in my apartment, with the company of my research assistant, Mordecai the rabbit. Working during the pandemic meant having to give up fieldwork and reshape the research, but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it pushed me to reflect on creating an instrument with the data already available, which would be far more accessible than evaluation tools requiring expensive data collection. At the same time, working on policy instruments in such a tormented time felt pointless at times and I had to remind myself that someone at some point might find inspiration in my work and perhaps apply or further develop my index to push for more just policies for endangered languages, or advocate for the recognition of contested ones, or showcase the disparities among dominant and minoritised languages, giving a tool to activists to challenge the status quo.

During those difficult times, and in all times ever since, I was lucky enough to rely on the support of not only my mentors at Ulster University but also my PhD cohort. I can safely say I could not have completed this book without their encouragement and their friendship. Thank you Nada Ahmed, Marc Olivier-Loiseau, Micheál Hearty, Nicole Marinaro, Nisan Alıcı, Cira Pallí-Asperó, Nevena Klobučar, Gianluca Porta and many more early-career researchers with whom I have shared the challenges and the successes of academic life over the past six years. I am also incredibly grateful to my parents, my whole family, and my friends who have supported my career unconditionally and enthusiastically. I want to dedicate this work to my grandmother, Silvia Nottoli. While her dreams of pursuing higher education were shattered by the harsh reality of Fascism and World War II, she has been nurturing a deep love for learning, reading, and travelling, passing this thirst for knowledge on to all of us grandchildren. Grazie, nonna, questo libro è per te.