The hegemonic position of English in the academic field

Abstract

English has achieved a hegemonic position in the field of science and technology and is gaining ground as the means of instruction in higher education. These developments have raised concern in numerous circles about the effects of the reduction of multilingualism in the academic fields, and some authors have warned against a possible scientific diglossia that might reduce all language but English to the status of non-academic languages. In this paper we argue that this approach is insufficient because it misses two fundamental points: on the one hand, it reduces the scientific field to only one of its dimensions, namely publication in scholarly articles, whereas academic life includes many other scholarly activities; on the other hand, the number of academic languages has actually increased in the last decades. Confronting these approaches, we propose to understand the aforementioned evolution in terms of a socioeconomic transformation which has triggered a number of new language choices. Plurilingualism has been a traditional feature of communities with an academic language, and we illustrate this plurilingualism with Catalan, a language that regained the status of academic language in the 1970s and is currently used side by side with Castilian and with English. To finish, some considerations are raised about the risk that English goes beyond its role of academic lingua franca and becomes appropriated as a legitimate vehicle of in-group interaction among members of other communities.