Carme Junyent, president of the Catalan government's Linguistic Advisory Council, has died at the age of 68, due to pancreatic cancer. In a message on her Twitter profile this Sunday, written by her children, the family has announced the death of the renowned linguist and defender of the Catalan language and adds that they will soon announce "details of the farewell ceremony". Junyent was a leading and often outspoken voice on Catalan languages issues and also an expert in African languages and endangered languages.
Born in 1955 in Masquefa, in the Catalan county of Anoia, Junyent was a professor of linguistics at the University of Barcelona's (UB) Faculty of Philology, and specialized in endangered languages, linguistic anthropology and the languages of immigration in Catalonia - and director of the UB-based Endangered Languages Study Group (GELA). She was the author of a vast body of work on the situation of the world's languages and linguistic diversity. Junyent was also president of the Generalitat's Linguistic Advisory Council and was awarded the prestigious Catalan honour, the Sant Jordi Cross, in 2019 "for her long career in the study and defence of linguistic diversity in Catalonia and around the world".
Junyent studied philology at the University of Barcelona and also at the universities of Marburg, Cologne and California. She obtained her doctorate at the University of Barcelona with a thesis on languages in Africa and their expansion. She worked as a professor of general linguistics in the UB's Faculty of Philology.