The problem of anglophone squint

Abstract

The limited attention given by anglophones to the literature in other languages is a notable long-term condition, and Aalbers (2004) has quite volubly brought to the attention of readers of Area some of its manifestations and consequences. 'Anglophone squint', as it has been dubbed, is very evident in geography journals emanating from the English speaking world (Whitehand 2003), as Aalbers made clear in different terms. The increasing dominance of the English language in several types of geo graphical communication over the past 100 years has been spelled out with characteristic thoroughness by Harris (2001). Fortunately, the distorted vision that has accompanied this trend is at last being recognized as a serious impediment by a sizeable number of researchers (Garcia-Ramon 2003), though the grounds for concern that have been expressed have tended to be more political than intellectual (Gregson et al. 2003). My purpose here is to rehearse briefly a few facts and speculations that bear on the problem and then identify some pointers in the search for remedies: for though we may differ in our grounds for concern there is surely common ground in the pursuit of solutions. Short et al. (2001) and Gutierrez and L6pez (2001) have demonstrated the limited sense in which the large majority of the most visible human geography and general geography journals might be regarded as international. While many of them purport to be international, the reality is that they are at best inter national only within the English-speaking world. In most cases the majority of authors emanate from the country in which the journal is published (the USA or the UK). Similarly, anglophone authors have been heavily over-represented in citations at least since the 1 960s: there was a marked increase in the citing of articles by American geographers, relative to those by French and German geographers, in the first three decades after the Second World War (Whitehand and Edmondson 1977). More recently the lopsided pattern of international communication that developed has been compounded by the increasing emphasis that indexing organizations have given to English-language journals. From its inception, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) concentrated largely on journals in the English language and now only two of the 35 'geography' journals covered in its Social Sciences database are not primarily or exclusively in English. Of course the use of the English language in the most visible journals is not in itself the main part of the problem. Much more serious is the weak repre sentation within these journals of work by researchers from the non-anglophone world. The large majority of geographical research emanating from outside the English-speaking world is not published in Eng lish, and since most anglophone geographers today are practically monolingual, this work is virtually unknown to them. And this is at a time of increased awareness of the international dimensions of research among non-anglophones. As Aalbers (2004) suggests, it is easy to believe that the meagre representation of work by non-anglophones in the English-language journals reflects in part a less-than-welcoming attitude by the gatekeepers of these journals. The unintelligibility of some of the kinds of English to