José María Sánchez Carrión

Despite being arguably the best known local academic proponent of reversing language shift measures, he has never held a stable university post in the Basque Country.

Sánchez Carrión's insistence on the necessity of compacting Basque speakers has been often cited by advocates of the territorial principle of linguistic rights.

[5] However, his most notorious work is his doctoral thesis Un futuro para nuestro pasado [A future for our past] (1987), as it has offered to many Basque language loyalists a theoretical framework for their activity.

[6] Further expanding the sociohistorical linguistics approach of his doctoral thesis, he wrote "Las lenguas vistas desde la historia versus la historia vista desde las lenguas" [Languages seen from the point of view of history versus history seen from the point of view of languages] (EI-SEV, 1992).

[7] In 1999 the Bilbao City Council published Sánchez Carrión's book Aplicación sociolingüística de la territorialidad [Sociolinguistic application of territoriality].