Dear Dr. Paul R. Carr,

It is an undenying fact that English is most read/used language. But it is also a fact that research literature published in other and local languages are often of quite high quality. This is not my statement, I have read it in one of the "Current Comments" by Eugene Garfield, the creator of Science Citation Index and one of the most sought after weekly publication (still early -mid '90s) "Current Contents"

Regarding the researchers' prioritization to English journals for publication is simply because of higher readability (& thereby possibility of higher citations) of one's research publication. I have worked in a National Biomedical Research Laboratory as in-Charge of its library for more than a decade & a half and I observed a specific trend among the scientists regarding submission of papers. They often targeted Foreign Journals (UK, USA, Netherlands, Germany etc) for possibility of high visibility among their peers globally. In the same way, submission of articles in English journals  certainly enhances possibility of visibility (or enhances visibility of people who matters) It is a fact that Best Indian Research articles were(& are) published in Western Journals.

I have seen Dr. Phillip Altman's argument about the Area Studies issue.  I just like to add that Germany is the Country where high quality Research In Sanskrit is done (& published) while Sanskrit is one of the earliest Indian languages!!

Siddhartha S. Ray

Really good question! In my experience, non-english-speaking researchers reserve their best research to be published in English - publishing stuff that is less "à la mode" in their own languages. That has to do with an academic culture where even humanities or social sciences have to publish in journals with an impact factor. And the vast majority of those journals are English only. Actually, I think that this at times is a type of academic imperialism. Take for instance area studies. The most important 10 journals on Latin American Studies are published in the US and the UK - and are English-only. So, the real experts, Latin American scholars, are forced not only to translate their thoughts but also to adapt to a different academic culture. They are integrated as marginals in an academia dominated by "the gringos". And, speaking openly, I do not think that this is for the benefit of neither party.

Dear Dr. Paul R. Carr,

It is an undenying fact that English is most read/used language. But it is also a fact that research literature published in other and local languages are often of quite high quality. This is not my statement, I have read it in one of the "Current Comments" by Eugene Garfield, the creator of Science Citation Index and one of the most sought after weekly publication (still early -mid '90s) "Current Contents"

Regarding the researchers' prioritization to English journals for publication is simply because of higher readability (& thereby possibility of higher citations) of one's research publication. I have worked in a National Biomedical Research Laboratory as in-Charge of its library for more than a decade & a half and I observed a specific trend among the scientists regarding submission of papers. They often targeted Foreign Journals (UK, USA, Netherlands, Germany etc) for possibility of high visibility among their peers globally. In the same way, submission of articles in English journals  certainly enhances possibility of visibility (or enhances visibility of people who matters) It is a fact that Best Indian Research articles were(& are) published in Western Journals.

I have seen Dr. Phillip Altman's argument about the Area Studies issue.  I just like to add that Germany is the Country where high quality Research In Sanskrit is done (& published) while Sanskrit is one of the earliest Indian languages!!

Siddhartha S. Ray

Dear Paul, more than the question, I like very much the justification you provide for it.

This is, no doubt, a most sensitive and complex issue. Beyond the traditional assessment about the "lingua franca", it is undeniable that there are both a sort of cultural imperialism, and a clear sense of lazinnessm and lack of real work for thinking, understamding, learning and opening up to other cultures, languages, worldviews. Ageee with you, indeed.

After all, the richness of scince and culture at large lie in the diversity and multiplicity, rather than in common standards, formalism and universalism. Any theory that is developed within a certain culture and tradition is very much different when taken and overlapped into any other culture. If so, then it is the cultural ressort the real rationale for the understanding of a theory or model. This, however, is a most serious gap in the understanding of science at large.

We are currently facing a science "without culture" - and is the most serious peril for any serious research endeavour. How do we call that? Indoctrination...

Hi Paul

You raise some very good points that probably can only be addressed adequately by researchers who publish in more than one language.  Another set of biases relating to your points is the extent to which cultural and ideological backgrounds influence research published in English. Given the dominance of US and UK researchers in many of the English language research journals there are likely to be cultural biases which frame research questions, research strategies and explanations for research findings. 

To give one example which is relevant to public health; addictions such as gambling and smoking are often framed as individuals making poor choices (individualist framing) rather than as the pervasive influence of advertising by corporations (social engineering framing) affecting the behaviours of large groups of people. The development of ideas such as the 'obesogenic environment' is an example of reframing outcomes as being influenced by social and group processes, not just individual behaviours.

Hi David,

Thanks for your response. You raise an interesting point that extends the analysis I started to formulate in discussing the hegemony embedded within English-language cultures (the US versus, say, Canada, Australia, NZ, etc.). Countries with significant English-speaking populations, like India and Pakistan, may face particular linguistic issues that may place them at a disadvantage, in addition to other cultural barriers. 

I know that some journals provide abstracts in several languages, and wonder if that plus keywords might be helpful in directing researchers to a broader diversity of research in diverse languages. 

The concern about cultural bias is even more problematic, and the supposed neutrality of language should always be questioned, especially, I imagine, in the social sciences. In my own experience, the English-French divide within Canadian scholarship is sometimes quite striking, and, although there are many bilingual journals, networks and resources, many people stay within their linguistic silo.

Best regards,

Paul

The most evident thing is that people who have Englsh as mother tongue sometimes mix "human thinking" with coincidental English vocabulary, including in theory of science and that this is evidently  not commented by editors and reviewers. It would not be polite to point our examples here but one can probably make a quantitative study of the phenomena.

Hola Philipp y Carlos,

Espero que no sea un problema de escribir un poco en español para decirles que aprecio mucho sus respuestas y también para notar que, como dice Philipp, es casi imposible de hacer estudios de área, como estudios latinos o hispánicos, sin entender y apreciar la lengua y el contexto sociolingüística, y también, como dice Carlos, que esta hegemonía lingüística resulta en un universalismo peligroso por la elaboración del conocimiento. Podría añadir que, como los EE.UU juega un papel muy importante en esta lucha hegemónica al nivel de la lengua, la ideología, la epistemología, la política y la economía de este pais de lengua inglesa se vuelve casi irresistible y sofocante para las otras lenguas y, con respecto de nuestra discusión, la gente de otras perspectivas y, claro, de otras lenguas.

Saludos cordiales

Paul

We had this problem in the last Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change assessment when looking at how risk was framed in different languages/cultures. Getting refereed material on this was really difficult but it is a very important issue when dealing with decision making on global change issues.

Hello Paul,

A very good question indeed. In continental Europe this issue is of highest importance. We have major European languages (Spanish, German, French, Italian) with scholars often publishing only in their mother tongue. These very interesting publications often do not move beyond their own linguistic borders. We have partially tried to solve this problem in our open access 'European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults' (see: www.rela.ep.liu.se) as follows. We encourage authors to submit papers in their own national language. Such submissions are then blind reviewed by scholars who know that particular language. When eventually accepted for publication, the authors are invited to translate their contribution into English, the language in which the paper is ultimately published. In this way we try to attract contributions that otherwise never would have reached an audience beyond the particular borders. However, this strategy has only been partially successful, since either the researchers still prefer to publish in their own familiar journals, or they immediately submit their papers in English, since they have adapted to the hegemony of English in the academic world today. The latter case often applies to smaller European languages such as Swedish, Danish or Dutch. If you look on our website at our call for papers, you will notice that we now have an issue in preparation that exactly addresses the questions that you raise (see call for papers on 'Cartographies of Research on the Education and Learning of Adults').

Best regards

Danny

Very good question, indeed. As a researcher that has published both in my mother tongue - Portuguese - and in my second language - English - I do feel the weight that is given to papers in different languages varies greatly. There is a certain prejudice against publishing in languages other than English - recently I got a comment from an international panel that I had too many publications in Portuguese. Nevertheless, Portuguese is one of the top 10 languages in the world - over two hundred million people are Portuguese native speakers. In Brazil, for instance, many practitioners and, even, some academics do not have enough proficiency in English to understand an academic paper published in that language, even if it is about their own reality.

This is really a difficult issue to solve: should we bow to the weight of metrics (high impact factor journals are usually in English in my subject area) or should we cater for the practitioners and publish our research findings in a language they can understand in order to have a greater impact in their daily issues?

I would like to hear some more thoughts on this issue.

Best regards,

Patrícia 

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your answers to the question I posed, which help complexify and nuance the sociolinguistic pertinence of language in the research process. Increasingly, I am wondering about the value of translation. I do appreciate Danny's insight on the matter, and read with interest the approach used by the journal he is associated with, as follows:

As academic and policy debate is increasingly carried out in the English language, this masks the richness of research knowledge, responses and trends from diverse traditions and foci. The journal thus attempts to be linguistically 'open access'. Whilst creating a forum for international and transnational debate, contributions are particularly welcome from authors in Europe and other locations where English is not the first language.

I wonder how common this, and how engaging it is for English-only speakers as well as the outcomes but I do believe that this is very interesting model, one I suspect is relatively avantgardiste in the field of research.

On the one hand, translation is indispensable to be able to read texts and documents in a language that one understands, and this is indisputable. On the other hand, the language first used to develop thoughts, research and knowledge can be sidelined and diminished in the process.

As mentioned in our conversation above, if we know that a document will be translated (say a UN or international-level document), the beginning, middle and end of the research may focus only on what is available in the English-speaking world, albeit it is important to acknowledge that many excellent peer-reviewed journals function quite successfully in English. It is easy to lose track of concepts, ideas, vocabulary and, significantly, the hegemonic value of language.

The argument could be made, perhaps, more easily if we were to talk of poetry, and some fo the pitfalls of translation in that regard.

Best regards,

Paul

I do not believe that this hegemony can be measured except by the cardinality of research papers in the English language. However, I do think that this dominance is not overly worrisome because it is self-correcting.

            First, let's look at the character of language influence, which has been with us since the beginning of civilization, i.e., the forming of tribes into uniform cultures. At one time in the Western world, an individual's influence was proportional to how well he could speak Latin. (Historically, women did not write, or they did so under a male pseudonym.) Over the centuries this influence shifted about to French and then English, as dominant cultures weakened and others grew stronger. Whether these shifts were due to military or technological advances is probably irrelevant because the "military-industrial complex" has also always been with us. Thus, it is a safe bet that English influence, too, shall wane.

            In research governed by the scientific method, the turf is leveled somewhat because of the role of objectivity and the null hypothesis, and because mathematics itself is language-neutral. However, I think that hypotheses are always subjective and therefore culture-driven. Hence, even in scientific research, language dominance rules.

            Yet, as various researchers attempt to pursue the findings of a particular paper, they bring their own culture to bear and at the same time, their pursuit tends to filter out any subjective bias inherent in the original research that cannot be supported by new results. This is what I mean by self-correction. This is why I believe that the language one chooses to use in scientific research, although perhaps important, is not critical; that there is less to hegemony than meets the eye.

            The same is not true in belles lettres.I love to read books in French and marvel at turns of phrase that seem to me unique in that language. Here is where culture plays a major role. Some translations are better than others; few are exact. Subtleties and nuances are lost and things that may be clear in one language are obscure in another. In belles lettres, and unfortunately in politics and in business, too, every language is unique. Caveat orator.

Dear Paul,

It is indeed a very good question as has been said already, and a very interesting one. 

I am adding my (non-scientific) 5 cents: I publish in English, German, and Russian because I like the challenge of using languages other than English. 

While English is admittedly the lingua franca, the choice of language affects the way of thinking. At least, it does with me. It also seems that there are different traditions of how you write for research. It seems to me that German is more content based, whereas English is directed towards the reader. Juliane House has done a lot of research as far as a comparison of English and German is concerned. 

It also seems that it is a question of identity, perhaps. How I see myself in the world of academia, how I want other to perceive me, etc.

All the best from Austria,

Edith

I too find this practice to be a type of cultural imperialism that undermines the scientific enterprise and leads to the creation of dogma. The ability to assess empirical data in different socio-cultural contexts in my estimation increases the likelihood that researchers will develop enhanced and/or fuller meanings/understandings of the elements of our social world. In my estimation, it is these "enhanced" or "fuller" meanings of elements of our social world that will enable researchers to create better conceptualizations/theories about the social world.

The situation is a conundrum, however. As professional researchers we are often forced down the path of acceptance of this form of hegemony in order to survive professionally. It's reasons like this that make Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" resonate so deeply within me.

Hello everyone,

Many thanks for the thoughtful questions and responses so far. As someone who has been doing research and publishing in this area for some time now (specifically: the geopolitics of knowledge production and knowledge mobility in the context of English as an international language), I would like to stress that one very way to promote knowledge production beyond English is to train oneself to write and publish in other languages at the same time. This training has to be holistic, which requires one to possess linguistic, sociolinguistic, academic, cultural, and attitudinal knowledge and awareness in the languages one can write. Some of my own research findings point to the connection between researchers' attitudes towards a certain (linguistic) audience and whether or not they want to engage with that particular audience through publications, and if they do, how they would do it. It is also relevant if researchers/scholars see themselves as public intellectuals and define their territories of knowledge production accordingly.

Another finding from my research I would like to highlight is that many researchers when writing in their own languages (other than English) tend to write in ways that are much influenced by English and its associated academic norms and values (I acknowledge that academic writing norms in English are not necessarily rigid and non-negotiable, but they do have some particular rules and expectations). An editor of an academic journal in Asia also raised this issue with me, when he indicated that he had had to do so much editing because many writers could not express themselves competently and sensibly in their own language and to their own linguistic and cultural audience. He added that their writings were as if they must have translated from and processed in English in the first place. 

So the above points, I hope, are possible answers to the impact of the hegemony of the English language on knowledge production, although from another perspective, one can also argue that "English has contributed to enriching local writing norms and practices" ;). I would like to hear what everyone thinks about this point.

As for me, on the one hand, it is great to publish in English where my work can reach a wider international audience. But on the other hand, seeing myself as a public intellectual in multiple spaces, I do take pride in my ability to participate in and contribute to scholarly debates at various levels with colleagues who write in languages other than English. One of such spaces is my home language space, Vietnamese. 

Publishing in Vietnamese is never easy for me. I understand that I will never be able to write as a monolingual anymore, because I have been operating in two languages at the specialised academic level for a long enough time that the inter-language space is now the norm. But interestingly, I always find it a lot more natural to write poetry and literature in Vietnamese. I can feel much better in Vietnamese.

My latest writing project in Vietnamese has been to invite a group of Vietnamese intellectuals to co-author a piece on English language education in Vietnam. We have developed three versions of it: one in plain Vietnamese targeting a lay audience which we will submit to a popular local newspaper, one is in academic Vietnamese aiming at a local academic journal, and one is in English which we will submit to an international peer-reviewed journal. It is fascinating to see how the group has been addressing writing norms and questions of politeness, authorship, and audience, among others.

Thank you again everyone. I look forward to continuing the discussion.

Kind regards,

Phan Le Ha (I am now with the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA)

I have given an analysis of the consequences of English as lingua franca in a recent paper with the title "European Humanities in Times of Globalized Parochialism". You may find this paper and a related one on my research gate site.

Best,

Gereon Wolters

Hello everyone again,

I look forward to reading the article "European Humanities in Times of Globalized Parochialism".

I had not been active on ResearchGate until just a few days ago, and have just added some articles/book chapters that are related to this topic. They are:

"Nation Building, English as an International Language, Medium of  Instruction, and Language Debate: Malaysia and Possible Ways Forward";

"Issues surrounding English, the internationalisation of higher education and national cultural identity in Asia: a focus on Japan"; and

"Fighting for the role of the nation state in knowledge mobilisation and research: An autoethnography of a mobile Vietnamese scholar".

My apologies for the self-promotion!

I do hope to continue the discussion on this question/topic with everyone. Your views/critiques of my work are much appreciated. Many thanks, Phan Le Ha.

Thanks, Phan, and I hope that all is well. I was at Monash U. as a Visiting Scholar for a month in 2013, and enjoyed the experience but see that you are no longer there now. The sociolinguistic debate plays out daily in Canada, and there has been a great deal of cultural and linguistic assimilation toward English but the French language is still alive and well. The problem of resources--actual books, texts, media, culture, games, internet, etc.--is a constant challenge but much can and is being done. Of course, developing a language base is critical, and publishing in languages other than English is one important step. Best regards. Paul

Dear Paul,

Many thanks for your note. I would like to raise another point here for you and everyone to discuss further: Are we really exaggerating the dominance of English?

Some recent publications from Robert Phillipson and Ryuko Kubota demonstrate that other languages are still very much alive and well, as you (Paul) say here about French in Canada.

My initial response would be: many languages are still alive and doing fine, however scholarship at the high end level in various disciplines produced in many languages (other than English) is decreasing.

I hope to hear from you and everyone regarding the question.

Warm regards,

Phan Le-Ha (Phan is my family name - this is the Vietnamese name order)

Dear Paul,

What about countries, such as Syria, where Arabic is still the language of instruction in all schools, colleges and universities? Are we missing a lot? We should, I believe, in the reconstruction phase of Syria, empower the English language more in the purpose of enabling our researchers to write and publish in Arabic and English at the same time. This way, we can hopefully preserve our language and promote our knowledge.

I am planning on writing a research paper for my EdD TESOL course and would appreciate all suggestions.

Dear Colleague,

The questions you raise are the focus of research currently carried out within the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (www.ulices.org) and are at the centre of our interest in a coming conference JET2- 2nd ULICES Conference on Translation Studies "International English and Translation", School of Arts and Humanities, Univ. of Lisbon, 2-4 December 2014.  The issue of acknowledging that different paradigms of science underlie the use of different languages and the relevance of considering the consequences of the current demand to publish in English is particularly pressing -- especially for all of us who use English as a second or foreign language.  

In case you are interested, the final programme for the JET2 conference is already online at: http://www.etc.ulices.org/jet and registration is still possible. Feel free to join us in Lisbon.

With kind regards,

Alexandra Assis Rosa

alexandra.assisrosa.com

http://www.etc.ulices.org/jet/scientific_programme.html

http://www.ulices.org

Hi Alexandra,

Thanks for your message as well as the info on your conference. It looks very interesting, and I wish you well.

Best regards

Paul

Just shortly, I do find that writing in English with reference to information about plant use from peoples who speak mainly a dialect of idiomatic Afrikaans in the South African context - means that those very people cannot access the writing. I have not come up with a solution yet, apart from using bits of particularly colourful and idiomatic local language interspersed in my text for my thesis! This just might not go down well and then impacts on readers from other countries!

It is a good idea to bring in at least some bits of different languages. New concepts can grow from that - in the long run. And readers get a chance to expand their knowledge horizons. Also: Can mean a lot to people speaking "small" languages (in the sense few speakers).