Ideologies about English as the language of science in Brazil

Abstract

AbstractThis article discusses rationalizations in the Brazilian scientific community about a stretch of language that is idealized as the ‘language fit for science’. In decoupling linguistic structures from the consequential whole of language practices, metadiscourses about the scaling up of science in Brazil (that is, its movement away from a national scale and towards English‐language audiences) reduce power dynamics, institutional hierarchies, and global inequities to a flat, harmonious space and homogenous time where science supposedly unfolds. Although recent scholarship has produced empirical evidence that contemporary transcultural flows and encounters produce hybrid communicative resources and transidiomatic recombinations, these creolized idioms are largely ignored in ideologies of the language of science. While this process of extracting an idealized ‘standard’ from the realm of diversity and recombination is not new, the resulting anxieties and insecurities among those affected by pressures for going upscale are renewed, and should be critically assessed.