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How to challenge Anglocentricity in academic publishing

By May 11, 2022May 20th, 2022151 Comments5 min read9,581 views

Top-10 countries producing linguistics research (Source: Scimago Journal & Country Rank)

US- and UK-based scholars dominate linguistics

Global academic knowledge production is dominated by the Anglosphere. In Linguistics, for example, scholars based in the USA and UK produce more academic publications than scholars from the next eight top-10 countries combined. Not only do American and British scholars produce a lot more linguistics research than everybody else, their work is also much more influential as the comparatively high h-indexes of linguists from these countries indicate.

55% of the 100 most cited scholars under each of the keywords “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics” with a Google Scholar profile are affiliated with a US or UK institution.[i] To put this figure in perspective: the population of the USA and UK together accounts for 5.12% of the global total. In other words, linguists from these two countries are massively overrepresented among the thought leaders in our field.

By contrast, not a single applied linguist or sociolinguist based at a university in Mainland China is among the 100 most highly cited scholars in “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics.” To put this figure in perspective: China accounts for 18.47% of the global population.

Challenging the Anglophone publication monopoly

Where the world’s most cited Applied Linguists and Sociolinguists are based, according to Google Scholar

For multilingual scholars, i.e. those with English as an additional language in their repertoire, particularly if they are based outside the Anglosphere, the stats above can be pretty demoralizing. Publication in “top-tier” journals and impact metrics have become central to hiring, promotion, and funding decisions in the neoliberal academy worldwide. Yet, despite the meritocratic rhetoric, the playing field is obviously far from level and multilingual scholars based in global peripheries labor “under a heavy mountain.”

The burden is intensified by the fact that academic publishing can very much look like a black box. While advice on how to get published abounds, what is missing are positive case-studies that showcase experiences of multilingual peripheral scholars challenging their linguistic and epistemic exclusion.

A look into the black box of academic publishing

In a new article titled “Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production,” which has just been published in Multilingua, my colleagues Jenny Zhang, Jia Li and I provide precisely such a positive case study.

As regular readers of Language on the Move will remember, in 2020, we co-edited a special issue of the highly-ranked international sociolinguistics journal Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis.” To the best of our knowledge, this was the first concentrated effort in English to address the language and communication challenges raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. The special issue centered on research from the Chinese world.

The special issue has been widely read and is already well cited. In addition to its topical exploration, it also constitutes a contribution to intercultural dialogue in applied and sociolinguistics.

US and UK linguistics research has an overwhelming impact on the field (Source: Scimago Journal & Country Rank)

Reflecting on the process that led to the publication of the special issue, we felt that it contained several lessons for linguistic and epistemic justice in our field. In “Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production” we make those lessons explicit in the form of a collaborative autoethnography that illuminates the process behind the product.

In the article, we reflect on enabling personal and academic networks, textual scaffolding, and linguistic and epistemic brokerage. And we have three take-home messages.

Against the center vision of “global” academic knowledge

The dominant vision of linguistic research is solely focused on the central circuit of academic knowledge production. Efforts at global knowledge transfer almost always move outward from this central circuit. In this vision, sharing center knowledge with the periphery is considered transformational. By contrast, Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis demonstrated that some of the most exciting developments in contemporary applied sociolinguistics, such as the development of Chinese emergency language services, are located outside the center.

Knowledge flows in many directions and many circuits. Engaging with multi-directionality and multi-scalarity requires the kind of networks and teamwork we were able to bring to bear.

For community building and an ethics of care

Within circuits of knowledge production, peripheral multilingual knowledge producers are assigned seemingly perpetual status as international students, academic novices, visiting scholars, junior partners, and interlopers in center institutions. These positionings ultimately preclude deep engagement.

At this conference in Wuhan in 2012, we had no idea our friendship would lead to joint research on COVID-19 communication in 2020

The foundation of our joint work goes beyond academic collaboration and is based on longstanding personal friendship. We consider recognition of the affective dimensions of knowledge production and the importance of ethical relationships of care vital to the decolonization of knowledge.

Confronting privilege

Jenny, Li Jia, and I each write from different points in our career and from different points of inclusion and exclusion in various centers and peripheries. The same is true for all academics and each of us has a responsibility to center questions of linguistic and epistemic justice in whichever position we may find ourselves.

For us, this has involved building and engaging with various networks, collaborating across borders and generations, creating publication opportunities, and volunteering our time and expertise to act as linguistic and epistemic brokers.

Reference

To read our collaborative autoethnography about linguistic and epistemic justice in global academic publishing in full head over to Multilingua:

Piller, Ingrid, Zhang, Jie, & Li, Jia. 2022. Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production: a positive case study. Multilingua. [free access]

Piller, Ingrid. Can we make intercultural communication less Anglo- and Eurocentric? Reflections on linguistic and epistemic justice. Keynote lecture at Re-Thinking Interculturalism, The Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research (SIETAR) Europa Congress, May19-21, 2022

[i] As of April 17, 2021. This includes some duplicates as scholars who appear both under “Applied Linguistics” and “Sociolinguistics” were counted in each category.

Ingrid Piller

Author Ingrid Piller

Dr Ingrid Piller, FAHA, is Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research expertise is in bilingual education, intercultural communication, language learning, and multilingualism in the context of migration and globalization.

More posts by Ingrid Piller

Join the discussion 151 Comments

  • PurebearJo says:

    Thank your (you and your friends’) works and achievements. Those are valuable. I hope plenty fruits continue.
    While reading the article, I remembered I also encountered many research materials and articles from Anglophone countries during the study in MQ. I wonder what caused this phenomenon.

    Is it because of people’s perception or prejudice? Does Anglophone countries have older history of Applied linguistics and sociolinguistics?
    Are there more traditional schools and institutions with public credit? Is it because English has impact on the world? Did they had faster recognition on importance about these fields?

    I remember I found two articles while studying other subject in MQ. One was from Anglophone country. And the other was not. However, the two articles had exact same content, structure, development method, and conclusion. The one was suspected plagiarism. The article from Anglophone country was earlier one and looked original. Furthermore, I felt ethical standards are relatively strict in Anglophone country. In this respect, I thought ethical issues and the quality of research content also need to be considered.
    However, I also oppose this phenomenon should continue in these fields. Since applied linguistics and sociolinguistics need to be studied based on various languages and cultures, diverse voices are needed. Valuable studies can be done from non-Anglocountries.

  • 烏 (からす) says:

    Wie vorher gesagt, war ich verblüfft (und eher enttäuscht) zu wissen, dass ich während meinen Studien in Spanien zweimal auf Englisch unterrichtet worden wäre, obwohl alle meine Lehrer/innen (und zwar, alle meine Mitschüler/innen) entweder spanische Muttersprachler/innen oder fließende Zweitsprachler/innen waren.

    Leute im Feld von angewandten Sprachwissenschaften sind, vielleicht ihrem Wesen nach, sehr gut drin, über derartige vorausgesetzen anglozentrischen Normen nachzudenken und diese auch infrage zu stellen, das Prestige der englischen Sprache bleibt aber noch bestehen (siehe ganz oben auf iLearn: den Namen dieser Universität).

    Die Mehrsprachigkeit zu feiern und Englisch von seiner Stelle als die zentrale Sprache in der Wissenschaft zu entfernen heißt auch seine Wichtigkeit zu schmälern. Ein Weg das zu schaffen wäre mehrsprachige Dozenten/innen einzustellen und es vorzuschreiben, dass Studierenden sich in mindestens einem nicht auf Englisch unterrichteten Kurs immatrikulieren. Andererseits könnten auf Englisch geschriebene Diplom/Magister/Doktorarbeiten genehmigt werden.

    Dessen ungeachtet müsste eine kulturelle tektonische Verschiebung stattfinden, bevor Institutionen den Willen haben, Änderungen zu machen, um Englisch von seiner Stelle oben auf der Pyramide zu stürzen.

  • Kelly says:

    Thank you for sharing this article!

    Whenever I write articles to find relevant literatures, I often find anglocentrism in academic publishing, that is, the literature in journals is mostly published by British and American scholars. However, the dominance of English in academia created by historical contingency means that the research of non-native English-speaking scholars, no matter how innovative, is automatically held to a higher bar. Improving the ability of non-native English-speaking scholars to publish research results in international academic journals is beneficial to the pursuit of knowledge. Therefore, the academic community needs to pay more attention to language inequality in academic publishing and the status of “English first” needs to be changed urgently in the future.

  • Quynh says:

    It is commonly accepted that the English language has the highest resource.
    I would not deny that I have the tendency to put more faith in the findings published by scholars coming from the English-speaking world. The major reason might come from their high proficiency in the language as well as personal bias in favour of everything coming from the West.

    This fallacy has excluded scholars from other parts of the world to contribute to the expansion of human knowledge. To tackle this false belief, it requires a huge concentrated effort from governments, institutions and most importantly, academic people. In Vietnamese contexts, for example, to deal with the lack of funds for research on the university scale, many groups of researchers have sought financial support from non-governmental organizations or cooperated with foreign scholars in international programs to publish findings. From that, they can better manage the process and outcomes as well as affirm the positions of the Vietnamese in particular academic fields.

  • Ayesha Akber says:

    I have noticed Anglo-centricity in research and scholarly studies throughout my higher studies, but I never gave it a second thought or didn’t even realize it carefully. I have been fond of American and British publications as I thought those articles are more interesting. This article on ‘Language on the Move’ provides us with data charts that specify that America and England have superiority in terms of publications. Contrarily, important studies in psychology are theoretical and have derived from the viewpoint of non-American and non-British experts. Was Sigmund Freud British? The answer is no, but how his book which was written in German, came out as an English thesis? Because English students worked on his legacy and wrote from their perspectives. when we speakers of English as non-native read his book, we try to relate the contexts with our findings. And then it becomes another research of a different language perspective. The three take-away messages that we get from this article are what we should remember to boost our work rather than our judgment. It does not matter which nation is publishing but whatever is being published, it has to help other nations to acquire knowledge from it. Students from different parts of the world have different concepts to explore. Their dilemmas will vary from other students of another nation. Creativity and obedient teamwork are crucial to bringing up solutions in times of crisis. Teachers and students from different cultural backgrounds focus on the benefit rather than what is going to be judged. Nonetheless, there will always be some stereotypical formula for some groups of people who insist on Anglo-centricity and purely have a blind love for it. I don’t deny the logic behind their choices either.

  • Em says:

    Thanks for the post! It has been interesting to notice another new thing that I haven’t noticed before: Anglocentricity in my studies. I’ve never actually thought about it before (maybe because the term itself was unfamiliar), but also because I haven’t had too many opportunities to read too many articles in English besides my bachelor’s… And now I get it! In addition, most of the units we have focus on linguistics from an Anglocentric perspective, as do most of the readings. I’m not sure, but I believe that the international power structure is also one of the reasons why, for example, there are not too many researches coming from other countries. Still, I feel like this has something to do with all the history and because of it it feels unfair for some…

    Maybe a little bit out of topic but I cannot help to wonder, why we learn British English in Finland instead of US English, but still see more US tv series than English ones.

  • Tushar says:

    Anglocentricity took over the world due to various reasons that are a part of history now. Looking at the current world and the interactions of people all over the world due to technological advances, we can expect the old paradigm of anglocentricity to break down eventually. If we study the different factors that gave power to anglocentricity, we can come up with different reasons and perspectives, but it’s the final result that we see in this world that reflects the pyramid of power that actually controls the world. What I mean is that the powerful rules the weak and the weak can blame the powerful and his influence, but there’s no point in blaming, rather moving on from the past and regaining your power in a noble way should be focused upon. As an Indian student, I always wondered why do I need to study about all these British and American people and their culture, even after already having such a bright culture in India as well. But I took it for granted that these books are meant to be studied worldwide and these must be really valuable and that’s why they are a part of my syllabus. I don’t know exactly the reasons on a global scale which affect the academic publishing, but there are beautiful voices in every corner of this multilingual world which deserve to be heard.

    • Thank you, Tushar! Couldn’t agree more that we need to listen to diverse voices and much is to be gained from multiple perspectives. English as a global language has, of course, many benefits – for instance, without English I would never have been able to read and engage with Indian literature. However, English favors particular forms of knowledge – those emanating from the Anglosphere …

  • Ian says:

    Thanks for the article, and thanks for articles throughout this course!

    In regards to this piece, it doesn’t surprise me that most publications are either UK or USA-based. It’s just so dominant around the world. I feel like the gap between British and American scholars is extraordinarily big compared to the second or third most popular languages in publications. I think this is only going to get more popular as English grows around the world; for example there would also be a significant amount of information in Mandarin, yet English’s global reach and learning practice means more people (on a global level) are using English publications as resources. I feel like English acts as the key to global information and knowledge. If you have a high enough proficiency, one can really use it to their advantage to increase the amount of academic research available. Is the academic publications becoming so Anglocentric a problem? I think both yes and no. Yes because it can cause a divide in different, reliable sources in different languages, but no because everyone can access them with a strong proficiency and can open so many other different doors.

    • Thanks, Ian! No doubt that a common language has many advantages – the key is to think constructively and creatively about how we can minimize the inequalities that flow from the dominance of English.

  • Hai Trang Tran says:

    English language and English-speaking cultures have long – lasting influence on educational system. On the one hand, the dominance of English can be a huge burden on researchers and academics. For example, one of my friends is researching about one area of Vietnamese laws. She can explain her research well in Vietnamese. However, in order to make her papers globally recognized and receive more international feedback, she needs to translate her research into English. Unfortunately, she is struggling to achieve a good research’s translation because she is unable to find the right English words to express her ideas. This is because some Vietnamese terms are hardly translated into English. On the other hand, Anglocentricity acts as a bridge for people to get exposed to a massive resource of reliable materials. Despite the geographical differences, people can create, learn and share their idea in a common language – English. This provides the reason why many Vietnamese parents would like to send their children to international schools instead of local schools. These parents believe that their children can take advantage of English learning to have access to better knowledge earlier and sooner.

    • Thanks, Hai Trang Tran! The law is a particularly difficult area to translate, as each country has their own traditions and conceptual frameworks. It’s a key area where the dominance of English is not only a linguistic imposition but an epistemic imposition, too. English-language legal texts shape ways of seeing and ways of doing and making law …

  • SunKyung says:

    I frankly couldn’t understand this article well, but anglocentricity may also be related to the rank of top universities in the world, I think. This article says when considering
    population proportion, anglocentricity was very severe in academic publication, and I’d like to explain that’s because US and UK universities almost rank top 10 in the world. In addition, inevitably English is universal language. In my case, when I searched data on Google searching engine, if the data pop up in other languages then I had to search again due to language barrier.

    While pandemic COVID-19 period, we’re still struggling, the information and cautions on COVID-19 were released in English for every foreigners who resident in South
    Korea too and I could also see the notice under the TV screen in English. That was inevitable choice I think.

    Every language experiences the transition of language and COVID-19 was added to English dictionary through pandemic COVID-19 period, therefore language or applied sociolinguistics has very close relationship I think.

  • Connie says:

    Hi Ingrid, your article reminds me of something that happened before. My best friend is in chemistry major. She needs to read a lot of references to write her final research, but those articles are all in English. Since I am learning translation, my friend asked me if there was any way to translate these references, or to find translators who could take up these jobs. When I asked her if these references were not in Chinese, her answer is that in the chemistry field, articles with new ideas or new results are almost available in English. If you want to read, you can only ask someone to translate or learn English yourself.
    This story happened several years ago, and translation software is not as easy to use as it is now (even now there are many problems with translation software).
    As far as I know, many majors in China are English proficiency required- at least in reading- due to the requirement of reading English references.

    • Thanks, Connie! The example demonstrates well what a huge burden the dominance of English in academic knowledge places on students, who face the double burden of studying chemistry and learning English to a high level (or paying translators; or making do with low-quality machine translations) at the same time …

  • Brownie says:

    Thanks for your and your team’s effort to dwarf the gap between English and other languages in academic linguistic publication. I also thought about it, not only in our field but also in other majors such as veterinary medicine. A few years ago, when I looked for information to do my research or thesis, it was hard to have appropriate resources by Vietnamese, even though Vietnamese researchers do much research, but they also write those articles by English to post in international journals. By contrast, English resources tend to be uncountable, however, with someone who are not good at English, they cannot approach those valuable resources. I think that the work of translators can be significantly essential and need to be developed in the future to deal with this situation. For example, I suggest that you can expand “Language on the Move” to more languages to help many readers in many countries can approach to your linguistic articles.

    • Thanks, Brownie! Love your suggestion to expand Language on the Move into other languages – we translate posts occasionally and are always looking for volunteer translators 😉 As you can see from our list of translators, no one has ever done a Vietnamese translation for us yet …

      Re your point about veterinary medicine, there is a lack in many fields of experts who have both subject and language expertise, and who can (a) teach effectively through the medium of English, and (b) translate (and I mean that in the broad sense of dissemination from theory to practice) knowledge from academic journals into practice in the field – I’m thinking of issues like antibiotic resistance through overuse in farming, or dangerous handling of pesticides as areas where important knowledge does not reach key stakeholders, with negative consequences for the whole of society and the planet …

  • Clara says:

    Hi Tram, the same as you, I always doubt the quality whenever I read the research published in Vietnamese. The reason for it is mostly because in Viet Nam, verifying the data in articles is authentic or fake is challenging, and even in the research that they put on the Internet, they do not cite references which are significant to increase the academic. However, we should look at the see the bright side since an increasing number of people are gaining master’s and professor degrees in Viet Nam. They do not need to go overseas to achieve a higher status in society and still do their research in Vietnamese. Some are also encouraged to do their work in Anglocentric journals in order to reach a global audience. I entirely concur that English a tool to get access to the world’s knowledge as it is regarded as the universal language. We should use it as a supporter to achieve our personal goals, not replace and take over the original one – our native language.

    • Thanks, Clara! It’s certainly important to be critical and alert for misinformation. However, in the same way that there is more high-quality information available in English than in Vietnamese, there is also more misinformation available in English than in Vietnamese – language choice in itself is no quality indicator, one way or the other …

  • Minnie says:

    Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I agree that this issue is critically important. However, it is significantly difficult to avoid the widely held and largely unquestioned notion that English is the dominant language in linguistic scholars. I remembered when I was writing my graduation thesis about online learning management systems, I tried to find resources in Vietnamese because they might fit well with the context of my study. Nevertheless, there is a limited related resource of linguistic scholars written in Vietnamese or languages other than English. The reason is that the medium of online learning was popular only in US-UK countries at that time and that specific area of research was widely studied in those contexts. It is also assumed that not all writers from other countries have the conditions of linguistic equivalence and an equal chance to succeed at or be equally productive and prolific in writing and publishing because US-UK-based scholars consistently rank highly in journal rankings. The reason can also be that researchers from all fields publish in more than one language, but those in particular fields (such as STEM) publish in English the most frequently (according to a Polish study on multilingualism in scholarly publishing).

    • Thanks, Minnie! Maybe you can write up your research about online learning in Vietnamese for a Vietnamese audience? I’m sure there are many teachers in Vietnam who would like to learn more about online learning (or any other topic) but don’t have the English proficiency (or time!) to source that research. Even if the world’s scholars communicate in English – and there are a number of good reasons for that – knowledge dissemination needs to be multilingual.

  • Logan says:

    Thank you for your article. Because there is someone who acts as a broker like you, a teacher like me can recognize the Anglocentricity issue and introduce it to the students.
    With a form of resistance to Anglocentricity, I want to talk about school education. I work at a private high school in Korea. As a unique activity program, schools introduce books dealing with problems with capitalism or hegemonism to students, and they discuss them. Some school members worry that the activity can give students a biased view, but I think it’s meaningful to give them a chance to think about things that we take for granted differently.
    As you wrote in the comment below, Anglocentricity is very severe in English education in Korea, too. There is a strong tendency to emphasize American English pronunciation, prefer English teachers from the United States, and prefer English learning materials published in the United States. I can’t tell students who prefer American English that such a phenomenon is wrong, but it has a tremendous educational effect by giving them a different perspective.

  • Haein says:

    In Korea, it is dominant to have the notion that if you have high proficiency in English, you can get a range of information in every part. Most restaurant names are even written and called in English, as well as banners and billboards. Likewise, English is dominant in our daily lives. Personally, the dominance of English in Korea is influenced by our education related to U.S. and U.K. contents. In particular, university lecturers provide evidence or information from those contents. They were mostly educated in the U.S. and U.K., and the educational curriculum in Korea is influenced by the U.S. For these reasons, it is common to search for and read articles from those countries, and even students consider the data from those countries to have high reliability and accuracy. However, since studying in Australia, I have explored a range of data and information from many countries, such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East. I did not expect that they would have high quality research and articles. No one has directly suggested to me to search other countries’ data, excluding the U.S. and U.K. However, many lectures at Macquarie University have posted unit readings or relevant readings that are not from the U.S. or U.K. This reading experience has inspired me to explore other foreign countries’ research. As many teachers and university students explore and read that in-depth research, I believe that the teacher could influence the shift to Anglocentricity in our studies.

  • koki says:

    Thanks for sharing this great article, after reading this article i understand why we think English is the most dominant language for academic publishing, that’s only because united kingdom and united states are the most two countries producing research and publication. However, it is hard to access articles in any other languages for example it is very hard for us to access Arabic articles as there is not much research in Arabic or they don’r really share their research plus its easier for us to find research and articles in English than Arabic, i think it will be beneficial to think about a multilingual scholars so everyone can share their writing and thoughts and it will be easier for us to access different scholar research.

  • Ziadah Ziad says:

    Thank you for the enlightenment Prof. Piller, I haven’t given much thought about it until I read this piece. And it is not surprising that the U.S.A and the U.K. are on the top list since most prestigious English publishers specifically for academic articles, are in their control and set to their own standards. As an applied linguistics and TESOL students even when I was doing my bachelor, most lecturers suggest that students have to cite trustworthy sources such as Sage, Science Direct, Springer, etc which are dominated by Anglosphere authors. One of the guest lecturers in one of the units that I am currently taking even mentioned that predator journals often targeted multilingual speakers/writers who are still struggling with academic writing. Further, the founders of various theories are often white men. Thus, we often believe that anglosphere researchers are always the best. And these ideas have been passed down and hegemonized for more than hundreds of years, becoming one of our subconscious/conscious academic beliefs.

    I am glad you point out that the lack of rich data is an issue that all of us have to deal with due to this ‘belief’ and researchers should play their roles not only as researchers but also as ‘linguistics and epistemic brokers.’ Your group of researchers also reminds me of the term ‘group genius’ which consists of people from multiple backgrounds, not a ‘mono group’. In the end, this piece also makes me wonder to what extent that I have to use that ‘belief’ in my learning. Now I feel slightly wiser :).

  • Clara says:

    Thank you for sharing an interesting article. Before when I did the dissertation in Viet Nam, I read many articles, but all of them were written in Vietnamese and by Vietnamese authors. However, moving to Australia as an international student, I have to be acquainted with numerous Anglocentric research papers in order to include them in the references in my assignments and case studies. It cannot be deniable that the Anglosphere dominates global academic knowledge production, and it is even more surprising to know that USA and UK scholars publish the most academic research worldwide. Many people ask me about my major, and every time they hear the word “Linguistics”, they do not clear what it is exactly about and often assume that my major gains more profound knowledge about Anglo. It is not wrong to opine that, and I also have the same question as Thao: Can the knowledge I learned from the course apply effectively to another language, or will it have certain limitations?

  • Chloe says:

    Thank you for sharing this interesting article. After reading this article, I once again felt the importance of English in the international arena. The reliance on this aspect of academic reference material in English cannot be underestimated, no matter the country. I have looked back at the reference materials I have read so far (the ones I used when writing my dissertation in my university days). In my four years at university, I wrote papers in three languages, English, Japanese and Chinese. However, no matter which language I used, all the references and books were either in English or in translation (the original was in English but translated into Japanese). This is because of sites like Google scholar, which I use regularly. When I search for a keyword, I find basically all the information in English. I think the reason for this is not just because of the trustworthiness of research from countries like the US and the UK.
    I don’t know if you’ve noticed that no matter what country or field you’re in, as education gets higher and higher, for example, postgraduate students, PhDs or professors will eventually write their papers in English. And then published internationally. I guess that’s why references in English take up more databases. It’s also the reason why everyone wants to learn English regardless of their country.

    Lastly, thank you so much for each of your articles, “language on the move” has not only brought to my attention details that I had experienced but hadn’t thought about intentionally. I have also learned a lot through these the article. And it made me feel the power of language. Languages are beautiful.

  • Hana says:

    Thank you for telling me an interesting story today. When looking for research data all the time, most of the sources for linguistics were centered in the United Kingdom and the United States. In fact, the studies of scholars in these two countries accounted for a large portion. In my case, when I look for research data on translation or linguistics, I feel that it is more reliable when the source is the United States or the United Kingdom than other countries. Why do many people feel like me? And assuming that the standard is a large population, why is the amount of data from China significantly smaller? Personally, I think the main reason for this is that English is widely used as a global language around the world, and people’s trust in it is also high. In addition, both countries are economically wealthy, so I think it was a good environment for these academic and thesis investments to be supported and influential experts to be fostered. As such, I also believe that the above country already has excellent linguists, so I think they use their research frequently.

  • XM says:

    Hong Kong has long been a typical anglo-centric city since its establishment in 1842 after the island was ceded to Britain. Its connection with major global financial markets and high interactivities with the world shapes the way people live. Although Cantonese is a major language, English is an everyday language that many people would use to communicate in schools and the workplace. Mastering good English would definitely open up plenty of opportunities for jobs as well as educational research like many other countries. However, I can see anglocentricity does not affect much on the recent progressive development of the Chinese medical system in Hong Kong. Students of this discipline will need to study a lot of Chinese classics such as Compendium of Materia Medica as part of pharmacology. This requires a high level of Chinese Language to become a medical practitioner as they would need to finish part of their study in China and the most recognizable research findings would be best represented by Chinese communities. What I am trying to say is that anglocentricity happens naturally due to practical factors, but it could hardly suppress the knowledge which culturally and linguistically originates from a mass population. Perhaps this is only one of the few cases.

  • Thao says:

    I just wonder, about the Anglocentricity in this course, that it claims that graduates can work as language teachers, presumably of English or another language. But then the theories are mostly derived from an Anglo perspective. Take for example the unit Linguistics and Language Teaching, would the methodology of analysing text types and grammar be applicable in another language. Would text types even be an area of focus in the education system of other countries. Australia is very focused on teaching students to analyse texts.

    However, this course requires students to carry out searches of literature to expand knowledge, and in that we are able to access knowledge from other published articles that is not of Anglo origin but I have noticed that peer reviewed articles are more likely to have Anglo origin.

  • Ying says:

    Thank you for sharing this article. The insights on the epistemic exclusion of multilingual scholars by Professor Piller helped me understand various aspects. I was surprised by looking at the huge difference in the figures for the production of academic publications after reading the blog post. Honestly, this is the first time that I am aware of this graph and as a student it makes me wonder about the situation of academics in my country and how teachers and students deal with it. It is true that Anglocentricity takes the form of dominance in linguistics. One such instance occurred while writing one of my assignments where all the case studies were from a foreign land and most of the scholars I searched online were from the Anglosphere. As far as I remember, I found no native scholars online who speak of the visible underrepresentation of researchers on the global map. I think it is high time that local universities create a repertoire of articles to show resistance so that we as students also get tuned with researchers from other European countries and get access to their works and are able to undertake various unexplored projects in linguistics in my country.

    • Thanks, Ying! Couldn’t agree more – universities have a responsibility to prepare their students for both global and local worlds. Sadly, universities outside the Anglosphere often are part of the problem by forcing scholars to publish in SSCI-ranked journals and by not counting articles in local languages towards promotion etc. …

  • Kat says:

    Thank you for the informative article. It is hardly surprising to me that the United Kingdom and the United States produce most publications. The popularity and dominance of these nations extend to language and numerous other fields. The popular belief during my university study time was that if information or knowledge is to be disseminated globally, it must be translated or written into English, which greatly influenced my university studies. When I was a student in Vietnam, my teachers constantly advised me to consult sources from U.S. and U.K. institutions. They claimed to be excellent and reliable research or subject information providers. My belief in and study of foreign research has led me to ignore interesting and noteworthy domestic research publications. Much of the scientific research in the country has suffered due to these misconceptions and is no longer regarded as valuable. Hence, researchers or research fields generally have trouble conducting research problems or issues in Vietnam. Sadly, some foreign research cannot be adapted to the scale of Vietnam, so more domestic research needs to be undertaken to benefit society.

    • Thanks, Kat! You raise an important point: like any ability, the ability to produce research in Vietnamese (or any other language) needs to be trained and requires a linguistic infrastructure (sources, terminology, publication outlets, etc.) – if these are not developed or maintained, knowledge sharing in Vietnamese will not be possible – to the detriment of the whole of society, as you point out.

    • Ziadah Ziad says:

      Hi Kat, I can totally relate to your story! I think if many students (us)/researchers/journalists are a bit wiser to see what resources we really need to use and be able to spot those worthy resources we have in our country, it will support and motivate national and local researchers to produce more works, encourage them to collaborate more, push them to bring the research to the public, and probably it will inspire the government to provide a bigger fund for research in our country. With this, the national/local researchers might solve their problems and be able to invite regional and global researchers to collaborate with.

  • Tviq says:

    Thanks for sharing!
    It seems to be fine that we default on English as the dominant language for academic publishing. When we look at the relevant literature or papers, we find that they are mostly out of the writings or journals of British and American scholars. And when we look for relevant literature in our own mother tongue (especially in non-English speaking countries), we find that these sources are on the whole inferior to those in English.
    Perhaps in the future, more non-English speaking scholars will improve these repositories to make them more accessible to non-English speaking scholars.At the same time, we should be rational about Anglocentrism.

    • Thanks, Tviq! All knowledge carries with it the responsibility to share it – that’s why linguistic restrictions on access – as any other restrictions on access – should be of concern to any scholar.

  • Sinem Emre says:

    Thank you for the interesting article!
    I completely agree that scholars are based more in USA and in the UK. But I also sometimes question this thinking can it be because USA and the UK have a higher population than Australia? Which means that they may have more scholars? That’s research I would love looking at 😊
    Each time I would want to read from different scholars for an assignment who have the best idea in their articles, it comes across as a foreign language. Therefore, I would have to use google translator all the time to interpret their great ideas! Some countries who didn’t include in English were Spain and Italy. However, when I did a few studies on Turkiye and wanted to look at scholar’s research, I came across plenty of English translated articles which was great! I sometimes have my own theory that some scholars in certain foreign countries don’t like to use English in their work as they believe that countries like USA and the UK already have enough scholars with the best research.

    • Thanks, Sinem! Australia has a lower population than US and UK, for sure. However, China has a much larger population than both, invests heavily in research, but gets very little visibility in so-called global research … generally, the lower a language in the global language hierarchy, the less research will be published in that language … this article has some numbers, which you might find useful:
      Piller, Ingrid. (2016). Monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 11(1), 25-33. doi:10.1080/17447143.2015.1102921

  • Tram says:

    Thank you Ingrid for sharing this blog. Honestly, I’ve never seen academic publishing in this way. I’ve always thought that there are not so many research articles written in Vietnamese because not so many Vietnamese people do research or because we lack the ability and resources to do research. Actually, whenever I see any research articles written in Vietnamese, I usually have a doubt about their quality even before reading them. After reading this blog, I’ve wondered why I feel it that way. Could it be because of the predominated number of Anglocentric research papers in the field of academia?
    Also, because of that feeling above, in the past, I usually told my students that they should learn English to get access to the world’s knowledge. Now that I feel bad about myself when saying that considering the challenges that non-English native researchers have to face. I’ve also started to question what about researchers with low English literacy. Because there are many people like me who don’t really take their research as high-quality as other English research papers, will they still want to publish their research in their own language? In other words, will this dominance of the Anglocentric academic world discourage them to do research in their native language?

    • Thanks, Tram! Don’t feel bad for telling your students to study English to gain access to the world’s knowledge. That’s a fact and for anyone in the world today to become educated involves learning English. All multilingual scholars face a double challenge: they have to refine both their language and their thinking. It’s true that English monolinguals get an easier pass but one of the key messages of our article is about the value of collaboration. Research is always a collaborative endeavor and why shouldn’t we pool linguistic resources, too? My collaboration with Zhang Jie and Li Jia has brought their work to a global English-language audience and mine to a Chinese-language audience …

  • Tu Nguyen says:

    The impact of Anglo Centricity can be clearly seen in the English language education policy in my home country- Vietnam. After the establishment of an economic reform policy called Doi Moi in 1986, my country witnessed an English fever which coincided with a worldwide trend toward English and a shift in Vietnamese people’s attitudes about the language. Consequently, the role of English has been shifted from an enemies’ language to an essential tool for having better employment opportunities or pursuing higher education. Under this new phenomenon, intermediate English language proficiency has become an admission requirement of every doctoral programme in my country. However, my friend who is a PhD student is concerned that this language proficiency is still insufficient for her to successfully publish an article in English-medium refereed academic journals. As writing for publication is one of her graduation requirements, she tries to deal with this language barrier issue by looking for a proofreading service by native speakers.

    • Thanks, Tu Nguyen! Your friend’s predicament shows another pernicious aspect of the dominance of English: the economics of it all are staggering as non-native speakers transfer huge amounts of money (in the form of proofreading fees, as in your example, but also royalties, ghostwriting payments, costs of language learning, etc.) from the periphery to the center – a form of linguistic colonialism and rent extraction …
      See also https://www.languageonthemove.com/multilingual-provision-is-cheaper-than-english-only/ and https://www.languageonthemove.com/banal-nationalism-and-the-internationalization-of-higher-education/

    • Tushar says:

      Thank you Tu Nguyen for the comment. In India as well, English has created its royal place in the Academic field. It’s not treated as a language for communication, but it’s a symbol of royal status and all those students who can speak it fluently are considered to be the top students. Some schools in India even require the students to speak no other language than English at school. From learning English to reading British culture and history, anglocentricity has shifted the Indian students away from their own language and culture. Even employment is one of the major reasons which has affected the Indian people in the past years where English has been made the must requirement to attain good jobs. And the worst part is, Indian students who can’t speak good English are looked down upon by their own Indian society. .

  • Lily says:

    Thanks for sharing this interesting article. Every time I read the articles you post I get fascinated about linguistics in culture contact. I really never thought of the issue of academic references in Arabic before till I read the article. It’s really surprising how much we depend on English resources for our researches because we really lack of linguistics resources in our language. This remind me when I was studying interpreting and translation and had to do my assignments and research I used to automatically search for English resources even when I was writing about something in Arabic. I believe that’s because English written resources are now available worldwide and well known. They cover big variety of studies and very useful. The funny part is even if I want to use an Arabic reference I won’t be able to because I haven’t heard of many writers or books especially about linguistics even if there is they are hard to find and hard to access and as you mentioned there is a gap in academic publishing. I think having multilingual scholars will help validate different intellectual knowledges and challenge them into higher academic writings.

  • Randomcastmember says:

    Thank you for sharing this article with us, Ingrid. In my perspective the issue of Anglocentricity also comes with the status quo of English as the dominant language of the world. In one of the units in Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL, I have written a discussion whether English is regarded as a Lingua Franca or a Tyrannosaurus Rex that will eat up space as well as the existence of other inferior languages. The study reveals that instead of publishing their academic work in their native language (Japanese, Swedish or Dutch), the majority of academic work choose to publish their work in English due to more prestige, as well as recognition for the writer themselves. This is what Swales (1997) calls “publish their best to the West” (p.378).

    Another reason that scholars choose to publish in the English language is because there are more opportunities that such articles will be cited by other researchers compared to articles published in native languages. Despite trying hard to publish their best to the West, the most cited Applied Linguists and Sociolinguists is still from the Anglo-sphere, not from the peripheral zone.

    My personal assumption towards this is that scholars from non-English speaking countries still fall behind those born speaking English because of their difference in English competency when being required to write in English. Those from non-English speaking backgrounds probably have to try harder than those who speak English monolingually, still they cannot compete with those from the Anglosphere.

    One example from my professional experience is that many Thai scholars still have to hire additional translators (with extensive cost) to translate their originally-Thai academic work to English publication so that their work could reach a larger audience and increase their chance of being known/cited in other works as well.

    For me, it is very difficult to resist the Anglocentricity as long as English still dominates other languages. Examples of the difficulty is that the majority of the assignments submitted to universities still do not accept the citation or references from those Non-English published articles (probably because they cannot guarantee that the information being cited are actually from the source because of language inaccessibility). What we could do now is probably encourage more voices, more publication from countries besides the top rank, because I believe insightful and interesting scholarly work may still not yet be uncovered or universally recognised because it was still in their native languages, not an English version one.

    Swales, J. (1997). English as Tyrannosaurus rex. Wiley Online Library. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-971X.00071

    • Thank you, Randomcastmember, for these reflections! One thing I would add is that it’s not necessarily an either-or proposition; multilingual scholars can publish in English AND other language(s); in the academic article to which this blog post refers, we show how we also published versions of the research in Chinese …

    • Justin says:

      I think to find a balance between English and other languages, it’s a good practice to have two versions of a paper: English and a translated version into the researcher’s first language, or even vice versa. I myself translated academic papers for some Vietnamese scholars, and I find that work really helpful to both the researchers and the academic world. We can also have translators to check non-English references in academic papers. Of course, that brings more time-consuming tasks, but offers more prospects for the translation job to be more highly valued in the linguistic field.

  • Abdulla Zubayr Nafea says:

    Thanks for the excellent article. This is true that the UK and US-based articles are dominating the education sector. I want to share one of my personal experiences. In the final semester of my bachelor’s degree, we had to write a research paper based on Bangladeshi schools’ contemporary English teaching system. I have gone through so many articles about the topic. Surprisingly, most of the articles were written by foreign writers. When I tried to go deep inside, I found that most writers were from the UK. Then one question knocked into my mind: how did they know about the English teaching system of Bangladeshi schools? I went through the articles’ reference lists and was shocked by the result. Most of the references were from Bangladeshi scholarly articles or books. But when I searched on google, they just showed me the writings of foreign scholars on the first two pages. So it is true that the world education system is becoming more anglocentric day by day.

    • Thanks, Abdulla! Good point – English is not just the language of global knowledge production, but also the metalanguage that drives search engines – the backbone language of the internet …

  • Mandu says:

    Thank you for the insightful article. I thought about this issue while I was searching for some information, but I haven’t really looked at the problem seriously. I figured it is what it is. Probably, that’s why we need to study how languages and cultures are closely related and see the phenomena critically.
    Now that I see these daunting numbers saying that English-speaking countries are absolutely dominating the academic world, it makes me feel very uncomfortable. Like all the other students who had problems finding the resources in their home language, I, honestly and shamefully, DIDN’T EVEN THINK to start to look for materials that I wanted in Korean. I just know that all the “important” materials are written in English. Actually, my reason to study English deeper is related to the issue. It is not just limited to the academic world. A majority of content on the internet is written in English. English itself is a key to the world. And this is sometimes frustrating to those who must study English as a second language.

    • Thanks, Mandu! I’m not surprised that you didn’t even think to look for resources in Korean … but it’s sad to think that language shapes how we think about the value of knowledge; if the most valued knowledge is only available in English that’s a huge barrier to knowledge dissemination … I think we need to think more creatively about multilingual production and the importance of translation. With print, it was difficult to produce different versions of a text but in the digital space, there are no such limitations; Wikipedia is a great example; and we’ve also played with translation here on this website – check out these two Korean posts https://www.languageonthemove.com/multiculturalism-alive-and-well-in-austria/ and https://www.languageonthemove.com/chinglish – unfortunately, getting volunteer translators engaged has been difficult …

  • BJYX_Sengarun says:

    Your article reminds me of the time when I was doing my thesis in Translation and Interpreting. My thesis was about Procedures in translating Vietnamese movie titles into English. Therefore, I googled previous research relating to translating Vietnamese into English. Nonetheless, it came as a surprise to me that there were few studies conducted by Vietnamese scholars. Consequently, my supervisor recommended searching for English-written research on the procedures in translation. Interestingly, there were plenty of them.
    Besides, while studying Translation and Interpreting, all the books we used were in English. Although information in the books was synthesized by the teachers in my university, their sources were still written by Anglosphere authors. My teachers teaching me Translation and Interpreting in my Vietnamese university even told me that Vietnamese sources for linguistics in general, translation and interpreting study in particular were rare so it would be better to learn from English-written books or materials. Nevertheless, teachers in my university, University of Languages and International Languages (ULIS) have been either organizing or partaking in numerous international language conferences to present their research, e.g. ULIS International Conference “Translation 4.0: Training, Research & Practice, The 6th Annual International Conference of the Asian Association for Language Assessment,… My university also encourages students to conduct various research regarding linguistics, Translation and interpreting and stimulates them to present in international conferences. This is still a daunting task but I suppose teachers and students in my university are taking the first steps to make Vietnamese academic research renowned to international peers.

  • Cocacola says:

    Thank you for sharing this interesting article. Speaking of Anglocentric, it reminds me of the time I had to read articles to do my research. Since I researched the context of Vietnamese students, it is best to seek out research papers written by Vietnamese authors who are familiar with the setting. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any related articles written in Vietnamese and ended up using all English references. This huge gap between the number of English and non-English articles not only disadvantages non-Western scholars but also readers, whose English can be less proficient.

    I also believe that Anglocentrism can also be seen in the choice of education. Vietnamese parents usually have a tendency to welcome Western than Vietnamese education. They often compare and fantasize about the system; therefore, they are willing to pay a fortune to let students have a chair in an international school. Furthermore, parents also compare the students studying in public schools less proficient than students studying in international schools. This perception actually makes me feel cringy as the proficiency of a student cannot be assessed through the school he or she is studying.

    • Thanks, Cocacola – interesting choice of pseudonym in the context of your comment 😉 … you are right, Anglocentricity in academic publishing does not exist in isolation but is embedded in many other aspects of the valorization of English!

  • Dung says:

    Thank you for your interesting article! I totally agree that in the field of linguistics, US and UK-based scholars dominate. In fact, it is also a belief among many people that linguistics research done by American and British scholars is more influential than the ones done by scholars from non-English speaking countries. In some units I studied last semester, I did search for appropriate articles for my assignments. I was in a panic because when I tried to use the term ‘Vietnam’ or ‘Vietnamese schools’, the result was limited and there were some irrelevant sources popped up. In contrast, when I used some key terms in general without mentioning the context in Vietnam, I found a lot of reliable articles which are the work of English-speaking scholars. They are articles published in prestigious journals. At first, this difference made me wonder about the reliability and quality of some articles by Vietnamese authors because they are published in small journals and some are published only in Vietnam. However, when I read these articles in-depth, I realized that some of them have good quality and really support my research. I feel proud and respect their efforts to do such good research in order to let their voice be heard. I hope that in the academic field, scholars from different backgrounds all over the world will be treated equally without being given priority.

    • Thanks, Dung! Another aspect is that research related to Anglo contexts is often treated as the default while research in Vietnam, for instance, is treated as a special case …

      https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17447143.2015.1102921

    • Haein says:

      Hi Dung! Thank you for sharing your experience. It has also influenced my assignment at university. As we need to find reliable and quality articles for our assignments, it is difficult to find quality articles from our home country. For example, one of my assignments was a literature review about my chosen topic, which was the impact of early childhood English education. I wanted to address contexts in my home country, Korea, but it was difficult to find articles that related to early English education in Korea. Even though it is dominant to have an early English education, there is not much reliable and in-depth research about English or foreign language education. For this reason, I need to change the topic to another context that has a range of resources from U.S. and U.K. scholars. Furthermore, many university lectures in Korea employed data and information from U.S. and U.K. scholars since they could get a variety of information from them. As a result, Anglocentricity could be considered to be rather prevalent in Korean universities as well.

      • Haein says:

        As we have lived in a multicultural and multilingual society, there is lots of valuable and quality research conducted outside of the U.S. and U.K. From another experience, I tried to find in-depth research about language learner autonomy from other countries since the content of the studies from the U.S. and U.K. overlapped each other. As a result, I could find reliable studies from Indonesia, Turkey, China, and the Arab. It was extremely interesting to read those articles because I did not expect that quality. Personally, it is difficult to get people to look for studies from other countries rather than the U.S. and U.K. on their own because it is easy to find articles from those countries while they are searching. However, I believe it is easier for university lecturers to propose that students study and read articles from other nations rather than the U.S. and U.K.

      • Thanks, Haein! Maybe you’ll have to do that research? 😉 Education is too important to build it mainly on a foreign model …

    • Quynh says:

      I see eye to eye with Dung regarding the difficulty in searching findings about Vietnam contexts.

      When I started doing my first assignment in my master’s degree, I knew nothing about referring to relevant sources in the literature. I realized that during my higher education, lecturers had never introduced us to finding information from academic research. All our learning materials were restricted to textbooks and reference books. In Vietnam, when students want to do research on the Internet regarding any issues or concerns, most of the results are coming from news articles rather than academic studies.

      Insufficient promotion policies for conducting academic studies might be a reason for the poor research performance in Vietnam, particularly regarding findings written in the local language. An obstacle in accessing Vietnamese findings can also prohibit the practice. For Vietnamese scholars, printed journal articles remain the major sources for reference, whereas it is way easier to find studies written in English digitally.

      To increase research productivity as well as its quality in Vietnam, I believe increasing the attention to university-based research by designing a teaching framework for this aspect to undergraduates should be the main focus of the government. In addition, putting more investment in research distribution websites might also be helpful in promoting the practice.

  • Ella says:

    Thank you for sharing this article! I personally have not thought of linguistics in this way, but thinking about linguistics in Korea, it is actually not as well known as in Europe or in the US.

    In Korea, I must say that linguistics is not a popular subject in universities, and there are only a few universities that offer linguistics as a major. As a result, the current situation of applied linguists or sociolinguists is likely to be similar to what is described about Mainland China in your article (or perhaps this is due to my lack of knowledge in the field of linguistics..)
    Still, I agree with you that multilingual peripheral scholars should challenge their linguistic exclusion. And the efforts should be globally spread out – not even in Mainland China but also including countries with linguistic minorities.

    • Thanks, Ella! In many countries, linguistics is rare as a degree in itself but may be part of some other degree, e.g., language teacher training, translation and interpreting, or information technology.

  • Japanda says:

    Thank you for sharing interesting perspectives. When I was an undergraduate student in Japan, I needed to write a graduation thesis. I was recommended to write it in English because my major was English education and I studied in England as an exchange student. My thesis was about the future of English education in Japan in the globalized world, and I needed to research British pronunciation including local accents. My supervisor told me to look for references written in English when I could not find suitable ones written in Japanese. As soon as I started to read some English articles, I had some questions and sent an email to a professor in England. He suggested to me that I should read another article, and eventually, I ended up using a lot of references in English. Luckily, I was able to read and write English and gain information from English sources. However, it must be unfair to those who cannot use English well. As an English teacher at a high school in Japan, I will make a great effort to increase the number of students who can be active in the academic field dominated by the Anglosphere.

    • Thank you, Japanda, for your hard work! Teaching is the best profession 🙂

    • Dung says:

      Hi Japanda! Your story reminds me of the time I studied at my Vietnamese university. I remembered that we had to write a lot of assignments during our university days. However, we even were not be taught why and how to cite other authors’ work when mentioning or using others’ opinions. As a consequence, I and other Vietnamese students are shocked when approaching academic study in foreign developed countries. In a unit named Contrasted Linguistics, which I took at my university in Vietnam, I had to do research to make comparisons between idioms in English and Vietnamese. I can remember how struggling I was to find the appropriate articles to support my research. I found a lot of articles written by English-speaking authors about the use of idioms, but I could not find any written by Vietnamese authors to make comparisons. Therefore, I emailed my lecturer and he said that he understood this matter. He also suggested finding Vietnamese books to read in the library instead of searching the articles hopelessly. I think such difficulties cause barriers in doing research in my home country – Vietnam in specific and other non-English speaking countries in general.

      • Thanks, Dung! Good point made by your lecturer: search engines are geared towards English, too, and bibliographic databases are usually biased in favor of English-language publications…

  • Yoonie says:

    n the US publishing market, translated books account for 3% of the market, and among them, translated literature accounts for only 1%. The United States, which leads the world publishing market, only focuses on exporting its own literature, but is not really interested in importing foreign literature. On the other hand, in Korea, about 22% of new publications are foreign literature. Recently, literature from various countries such as Italy, Spain, India, and Iran as well as the United States has been introduced and has become a bestseller in Korea.

    I believe the huge gap in the ration of translated literature between those two countries is a good example of Anglocentricity. Without literature, I would not have been able to explore other culture and embrahce cultrual diversity. I am glad to see more literary prizes now recognize international literature these days. Winning a prize wouldn’t be a goal for great authors , but will certanily serve as a gateway to be picked up by commercial press and gain a wider readership in every corner of the world.

  • Jhonny says:

    After reading this article and its subsequent comments, I started to think of all the times and spheres where knowledge and even people are regarded differently depending on their race and origin (I was going to write nationality, but discrimination seems to find its ways beyond a passport). Unfortunately, this trend will continue to happen until humans develop the capability of treating others like equals and find a sense of living beyond producing and predating.
    One of the most relevant features of the research performed by Professor Ingrid Piller and her colleagues is the reliability of the data. Through statistics, it demonstrates imaginaries. Besides, Language on the Move achieves academists’ work visibility in the anglosphere and beyond, which is simply astonishing.
    The article also made me think of another instance of work visibility. During my time teaching in the Colombian Amazon, I was able to see a project in which western practices and indigenous knowledge worked together towards conservation and environmental awareness, which I believe is a great starting point and a display of what the academic community needs to achieve.
    https://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?346765/Playing-to-Learn-in-La-Chorrera

  • Justin says:

    Anglocentricity in academic publishing has been a phenomenon that I’ve taken for granted for years, considering my major in the English language. In Translation courses I took, the studies I read were all written by Western scholars. I didn’t get to read any formal research on translation methods or issues related specifically to the Vietnamese language, written by Vietnamese scholars. This makes me realise how T&I studies on Vietnamese has been largely neglected right in the main territory that speaks it. The underrepresentation of academic research on T&I has contributed to a lack of professional training, making this career less promising.

    While prospects of this discipline look gloomy, a career in ELT provides more research opportunity. I acknowledge that many English teachers in Vietnam aspire to publish their studies on trustworthy journals, but they must be in English nevertheless. Looking at the bigger picture, I think addressing the domination of the West in academia is not necessarily a matter of privilege. It’s a difficult task due to the lack of incentives and financial support for linguistic research in my country. This depends on whether Vietnamese academic institutions can receive the resources and attention to make linguistic study a more attractive path.

    • Thanks, Justin! I think that T&I and ELT are in a sort of perverse relationship: the success of ELT in countries like Vietnam means that more and more people speak English. Therefore, professionals end up pressured to use English in international communication and to make do without an interpreter – this limits the domains where interpreters will be used and devalues interpreting …

      • Justin says:

        That’s what I find irritating when working in both jobs. I really wanted to do higher study in both disciplines, but I’m only able to find TESOL programs, while there is little opportunity to do a Master’s degree in T&I. We don’t even have this degree in my country, and it’s ironic when we may need to go to the Anglo-world to do this program instead of staying in Vietnam.

        • That is ironic indeed! … I am still surprised to hear that there is no Masters degree in T&I in Vietnam – is that a recent development? I’m asking because Socialist countries used to have some of the best T&I programs in the world – maybe that has changed? Or maybe Vietnam was/is an exception? During the German Democratic Republic, a number of German universities offered T&I degrees for German-Vietnamese (don’t know whether those programs still exist)

          • Justin says:

            As far as I know, currently T&I degrees in Vietnam are only offered at the undergraduate level. In the case of socialist countries as you mentioned, I guess in the past some Vietnamese academics in Vietnam were sent abroad to study linguistics including T&I, for example, in Russian. I remember some T&I training materials in my bachelor’s program were made quite long time ago, probably early 2000s. Most translators and interpreters nowadays (including me) just learn and improve from real work experience, and we seem to take it as the norm. If there’s no need for higher T&I study, then universities are unlikely to open those courses.

  • Chocomilk says:

    I was struck by how much percentage of academic publications from the United States and United Kingdom’s research covers out of the entire world. Professors and researches must continue their research, publish their work, present their results and even get recruited for new positions, but still there are limitations on scholars who do not belong in the Anglosphere. Even when journals and dissertations need to be written in English in many countries all over the world, it is disheartening to know that there is still go much gap. The fact that Chinese linguists are not represented in the topic Applied Linguistics and Sociolinguistics shows that maybe, “linguistics” itself has become dominantly English-related.

    • Thanks, Chocomilk! Agree that the numbers are disheartening, and that’s why we wrote our collaborative autoethnography to provide a positive case study:
      Piller, Ingrid, Zhang, Jie, & Li, Jia. (2022). Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production: a positive case study. Multilingua. doi:doi:10.1515/multi-2022-0034

  • Milla says:

    In Logopedics or Speech pathology, many theoretical and clinical approaches are first studied and generated in an English context. As a Finnish SLP, I must carefully consider whether I can transfer the results of these studies into the Finnish context. For example, the findings about language acquisition in English can be applied to other languages in limited aspects. This underlines the importance of reserving research also in languages other than English.

    Because speech pathology also investigates the social domain of communication, I often think about the cultural limitations of the studies conducted in western societies. The social pragmatic difficulties might be manifested or recognized differently in different sociolinguistic cultures. If only Anglocentricity is valued in the research of Logopedics, this would have a straight effect on evidence-based clinical work in countries that have not adopted the habits and traditions of western cultures. Suppose we don’t support the research in other than western and English contexts. In that case, the societies outside these contexts are restricted from making clinical decisions according to the best-known evidence. And in the worst case, this would be a broader issue affecting human rights.

  • brownies says:

    Hi Ingrid, thank you for shedding light on the fact that the publication of many linguistic research articles is Eurocentric. I have done a few assignments researching the context of Vietnamese students, therefore, it is preferable to look for research papers from Vietnamese authors who are familiar with the context; however, the results are mostly daunting. The research papers written by non-Western authors I found are in a much smaller quantity compared to the Western ones, and many of them are published by small or possibly predatory publishers. This makes me think about whether it is the research papers that are unreliable, or if submitting articles to small publishers is one of the authors’ few options since they are not seen as trustworthy as their Western counterparts. Moreover, when I do research regarding the linguistic field on Google Scholars without focusing on particular contexts, the first few results are mainly from Western scholars, thus highlighting the issue of racism and white privilege in the academic field.

    To counter this issue, the University of Languages and International Studies in Vietnam hosts various conferences where non-Western scholars and students can share their ideas and research papers internationally, thus promoting the diversity of authors in the field of research. I believe this is an informative and valuable event, and similar kinds of conferences are also being hosted in other Eastern countries, so hopefully, more non-Western authors will have their pieces published.

    • Thanks, Brownies! Academics in countries such as Vietnam are increasingly caught between a rock and a hard place, as they are required to publish in English for promotion etc.; publications in local languages often no longer count or count less. However, without proper support and resourcing publishing in international journals is incredibly difficult and academics in the Global South are turned into the easy victims of predatory publishers …
      The conference you mention sounds like a great effort!

  • Ste says:

    As I am researching translation quality assessment for this semester, I found that the Anglocentric issue has a slightly different shape in the field of translation studies. In translation studies, the term “translation quality assessment” (TQA) refers to the methods and techniques used to determine whether a translation is “excellent” or “poor”. Since each pair of languages is converted differently, a TQA model developed by a researcher under a particular context cannot be fully applied to the other language pairs.

    For example, House’s TQA model, one of the Anglo world’s best-known models for translation quality assessment, is developed under the context of English and German translation. “Overt translation” and “covert translation” are two key concepts of her model, where “overt” means rendering source text explicitly “like a quotation” while “covert” means reproducing the translation with an aim to make target text receptors feel that they are reading the original one (House, 2001, 2014). It would be justified to apply House’s model to English and German translations since the two languages are so “closed” to each other. However, if we place this “Anglo approach” in an Eastern linguacultural context, we have to assess whether it can be adapted to the Eastern context or should be modified.

    In the Chinese context, the idea of what makes a good translation differs slightly. As China has a long history in translation studies with the earliest Buddhist scriptures translation records dating back to the 11th century BC, a large number of translation scholars have proposed many forms of translation theory to evaluate and guarantee translation quality (Luo & Lei, 2004). One of the most widely adopted translation criteria is Yan Fu’s “faithfulness”, “expressiveness”, and “elegance”, which was developed based on his translation of Thomas’s Evolution and Ethics. The notion “elegance” has once considered the ultimate goal a translator should achieve. However, Yan Fu’s theory solely focuses on the translation direction from LOTC (languages other than Chinese) into Chinese, suggesting that it would be incompatible if one wishes to apply it to language pairs that the target language is not Chinese.

    From the above example, we know that each translation model or theory is developed under its specific condition and the lack of standardisation and consistency has been a limitation in translation studies (Castilho et al., 2018). In addition, the majority of new knowledge developed by Chinese researchers is published in Chinese journals, and the Chinese databases are not always generally accessible to the so-called “outsiders”. For instance, I couldn’t find Chinese Translators Journal (ISSN 1000-873X and CN 11-1354/H, one of the top translation journals in China) in the journal ranking website (like SJR), indicating that Anglo researchers would be unable to evaluate some of the knowledge produced within China. Therefore, I assume that the issue of Anglo-centricity would be “less” intense in the field of translation studies.

    Castilho, S., Doherty, S., Gaspari, F., & Moorkens, J. (2018). Approaches to human and machine translation quality assessment. In J. Moorkens, S. Castilho, F. Gaspari, & S. Doherty (Eds.), Translation quality assessment: From principles to practice (pp. 9–38). Springer.
    House, J. (2001). Translation quality assessment: Linguistic description versus social evaluation. Meta, 46(2), 243–257. https://doi.org/10.7202/003141ar
    House, J. (2014). Translation quality assessment: past and present. In J. House (Ed.), Translation: A multidisciplinary approach (pp. 241-264). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137025487_13
    Luo, X., & Lei, H. (2004). Translation theory and practice in China. Perspectives, 12(1), 20–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676x.2004.9961488

    • Thank you, Ste, for your detailed comment and reflections on TQA! Just a few random thoughs that might be relevant:

      • 1. All academic knowledge operates on various circuits, with the global circuit being most unified and most highly valued. I believe this is true for Translation Studies, too. Beneath that global circuit sit a number of national and local circuits of knowledge dissemination, of which is the Chinese circuit (or circuits?). Regardless of field, this/these Chinese circuit(s) is/are undoubtedly among the most powerful – again, in TS as in other fields. Even so, for now, it is no serious competitor to the global English-language circuit, but that might change over time, and will change for different fields at different rates.
      • 2. One of the reasons TQA is more sophisticated in some LOTEs relates precisely to the global dominance of English: translation today is largely a one-way street out of English; so Chinese (and other language) scholars have every reason to think about TQA but English-language scholars really don’t much of an incentive; see https://www.languageonthemove.com/no-translation/
      • 3. I’m not sure I understand your argument that the idea of elegance is a Chinese-specific form of TQA; the same debate has a long history in European translation thought – e.g., les belles infidèles. For sure, what an “elegant” Chinese text looks like is very different from what “elegance” looks like in another language, but that doesn’t mean the theory is language-specific; or did I misunderstand your argument?

      My two cents, and thanks again for your thought-provoking comment!

  • Hakunamatata says:

    Thank you for sharing these thought-provoking insights about the dominance in academics by the Anglosphere. I think non-Anglophone scholars face similar “double-challenge” issues with the linguistical minority children, as they must have outstanding expertise in their fields as well as fluent linguistic capabilities in English to get internationally published. Their English must be at a highly proficient level that allows them to compose academic papers and speeches with technical terms and a standardized scholar-like tone.

    I think in a way, through actively citing and interpreting LOTE works, fluent multilingual scholars may help to serve as mediators to ease these exclusions in the academic field, thus bringing unique insights and findings from different perspectives. Hopefully, advancements in auto-translation tools in the future may also likely to reduce the language barriers among scholars from different parts of the world.

    • Thanks, Hakunamata! You are right about the double challenge of language learning while performing in a new language – applies not only to children but at all levels.
      I’m not particularly optimistic about the potential of MT to achieve linguistic equality because (a) academic publishing is not only about information transmission but also about practices and relationships; and (b) academic publishing is about achieving distinction and if one means of achieving distinction becomes equalized another one comes along (similar to the way that professions where women have achieved relative equality have themselves become devalued …)

    • Kat says:

      Thanks, Hakunamatata. I agree with you on this point. It might be challenging for researchers to improve their language skills while also devoting time and energy to their research. Research articles conducted in a variety of nations should be disseminated more broadly in order to present multi-dimensional viewpoints and contribute new ideas to research that has already been conducted. It can be extremely difficult for researchers, which is why I hope that there will be an increase in the number of support tools and translation assistance organisations that can assist researchers. I think that one of the reasons research is conducted is so that people can have a greater contribution to society.

  • Shiyi.ke says:

    Speaking of Anglocentricity, a movie pops in my mind.In this movie”Isle of dogs“ whose background takes place in Japan, the humans speak the native language while the dogs speak English.To be more precise, all dog barks are translated into English. English-speaking viewers don’t need translations of screen subtitles to understand what they’re saying. But the words of Japanese characters need to be translated into English by some visible translations in the film. Through this context, we are placed in the dog’s perspective. The audience must try to deduce the meaning of the Japanese characters through the characters’ movements, or the tone of their voices- like a dog trying to understand people.It does a fantastic job of creating a sense of presence, allowing viewers to quickly and naturally imagine what a dog would feel like listening to a human being.

    Although it is set in Japan, it is still created for the English context. “Isle of Dogs” is an interesting case of Anglocentricity, because it’s not just a random use of another culture, it’s serving a whole story, it makes itself more English-centric.

  • Rebma says:

    Thank you, Ingrid, your research and collaborative work to confront epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production is really empowering. As you mentioned, the stats of Anglocentrism in global knowledge production is surely demoralising as the peripheral multilingual scholars are assigned seemly perpetual status as international students, academic novices and visiting scholars. This reminds me of my experience as an international student here back in high school, starting from high school year 10 after graduated from Intensive English Centre, I picked history as one of my electives as I was interested in it and performed well in this subject back in China. However, after my first history class, the history teacher had a chat with me and asked me to consider dropping the subject without evaluating my academic performance and English proficiency. His reason was simply that many international students could not succeed in this subject due to English proficiency so I would need to make a wise decision early without risking the HSC. Sadly, I gave up the opportunity to study history due to the trust for the teacher and the pressure from all my classmates who were native English speakers. But looking back today, I could have made it through history, and made contributions to the class as I succeeded in all other HSC subjects, and English would certainly not be a barrier that hinders my study. Today, becoming a teacher myself, I am fully aware of not making assumptions of my students’ academic abilities based on their appearance and nationalities.

  • Abed says:

    I believe that the sovereignty of the U.S and U.K in academia is related to the power of free speech and the ability to investigate into prohibited areas. The emancipation from church beliefs and religion have had those two countries to be at top, not only in linguistics and languages, but at all research areas. In middle eastern countries, there is this phenomenon of worshiping what western scholars said or thought of any matter like a cutting-edge truth when sometimes it is not true. I remember having a British instructor in college teaching English 101 and students worshiped him while there was nothing special about him just because he was holding a British passport. Once our dean hosted two American tourists in his office “white couple” with a big welcoming and the man sat there in the dean’s office crossing his legs and laughing like he owned the place. Zaha Hadid was a famous Iraqi architect who was recognized as a major figure in the architecture in the late 20th and early 21st all over the world. Zaha created a new concept in architecture and described by The Guardian as the “Queen of the curve”. She once said in an interview two years before she passed away in 2016 that her biggest failures were in the Arab world and that Arabs do not respect women enough and they disliked her because she was an Arab and a woman.

    • Thanks, Abed, for sharing this powerful interview excerpt! “The prophet counts for nothing in their own hometown”, as they say …
      I agree that Anglocentricity is not just an imposition from the outside but that a form of colonial cringe has become deeply ingrained in some parts of the world, and academics are particularly susceptible … you might be interested in my own little anecdote about the devaluation of Arab universities: https://www.languageonthemove.com/the-colonial-cringe-in-academia/

  • WAA says:

    Last week my cousin who is doing her research overseas (In Arabic) sent me two English articles and asked me to translate the abstracts for her so she can use them. I was surprised by her request, so I asked her why she doesn’t use Arabic resources instead, but she said that she couldn’t find any. This incident caught my eye to the lack of academic resources published in my own language, despite the large number of Arabic speaking academics. It also reminded me of my first essay on translation, where I couldn’t find any Arabic resource to use as a reference. However, I can understand that because I see that many academics who live in Australia for example, come from a non-English background, and they publish in the language spoken in the country they study or live in.

  • Sharkie says:

    I think this issue is very similar to health professionals (e.g. psychology, speech pathology). Evidence-based practice heavily relies on English based research. In the past, I was involved in a medical science field where I was studying speech pathology at the University of Sydney. Almost all clinical approaches are based on the research from English speaking countries, especially from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) and SpeechBITE (developed by the University of Sydney). Those websites are very famous for speech therapists. Almost every speech therapist that I know from Asia needs to conduct evidence-based practice via looking up journal articles from those websites. ASHA is definitely the first choice for them. One prominent example I can give is the stuttering therapy approach that was developed by the University of Sydney, they developed a program called “Lidcombe Program” (stuttering therapy for kids) and “Camperdown Program” (stuttering therapy for adults). These two programs are used worldwide for treating stuttering patients. This shows that there is not much evidence-based practice (internationally) that can beat the research from English-speaking countries. Medical students can do nothing but only ensure conducting these research to impress their clinical supervisors to pass their placements.

    ASHA (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association)
    https://www.asha.org

    SpeechBITE (Speech Pathology Database for Best Interventions and Treatment Efficacy)
    https://speechbite.com

    • Thanks, Sharkie! Reminds me of the book “Crazy like us” by Ethan Watters. It examines the spread of “the American psyche” and how ideas about mental health have become globalised. One chapter is devoted to the “importation” of anorexia to Hong Kong … I think you might find it an interesting read!

    • WAA says:

      That’s so good to hear!
      Congratulations Ingrid! I am sure that your book is going to be a very useful reference for many Arab students and I will definitely read the Arabic version of it.

  • Brynn says:

    I 100% agree with all of this. Especially while watching Dr. Rizwan Ahmad’s Mal Lawwal, it struck me just how rare it was to see someone not from a “Western” English-speaking nation researching and reporting on linguistics, and particularly a non-English language. It made me wonder how much more I am missing out on learning about because of this dominance of UK/US English within the field. Linguistics (like all sciences) has for so long been dominated by white, “standard” English-speaking men. This means that, as a science, it has only barely scratched the surface of what there is to know and learn about languages and cultures. I think that there is a massive decolonisation movement happening in so many cultural sectors right now, and I really hope that linguistics continues to be a part of that.

  • Emily says:

    I have several friends in academic fields who are from countries in South America, Europe and Asia, and have first languages other than English. Because they both conduct their studies and publish internationally, they use English as their main academic language, and I both respect them for this and wonder what kind of barriers it might create for someone who is involved in research but does not speak English as confidently as they do. This is mostly in terms of making their voices heard for an international audience, but also conversely applies to accessing the existing literature.

    While some language barriers like these are unavoidable, it is a shame that in the field of academic publications, scholars from most parts of the world are excluded, and scholars from a select few are prioritised. Going back to the metaphor of the centre and periphery of a circle, I think that there is a tendency to focus on material that either is from the West, or stands to be readily applicable to the West. If something is not from the West, it is seen as less reliable. If it does not directly relate to the West, it is seen as less relevant.

    • Thanks, Emily! You are absolutely right – there are even studies that show how international academic publishing favors “Western” knowledge and suppresses local knowledge: https://www.languageonthemove.com/does-internationalization-change-research-content/

    • Brynn says:

      Such good points, Emily!

    • Sharkie says:

      Hi Emily,

      you have definitely raised a great point here. Language barrier problems can potentially happen when people are involved in most areas of academic studies, including universities in most Asian countries, English is still unavoidable when doing required readings from textbooks or writing essays. Therefore, people with less English proficiency are forced to take up English courses as an elective unit to combat this issue. Thus, most research or scientific evidence is too heavily based on the US or other native English speaking countries. People may not actually realise that can also affect certain professions (e.g. like traditional Chinese medicine doctors). My country may be a Chinese speaking country, but there are still a lot of younger generations who do not trust or become sceptical about Chinese medicines (e.g. acupuncture or placebo herbal medicine). And instead, they would normally rely on Western medicine.

    • Emily says:

      Thank you Ingrid, Brynn, and Sharkie. Hopefully if these biases are pointed out and people who are less “mainstream” can have more of a voice, things will improve. Going back to studying and researching in English, I’ve conversely heard from friends about other cases in places such as Nepal, where textbooks are mainly written in English, including for grades below tertiary education. While this does help with English proficiency, the concern was raised that limiting study to English can also hamper people’s literacy in their first language. I think it’s part of the difficulty we discussed earlier in the course, of achieving bilingualism with full proficiency in both languages, as opposed to only one.

  • Bob says:

    Hi Ingrid, thank you for this article. Anglocentricity in academia is definitely an issue that should be addressed. While I do agree that having a common language in academic publishing is beneficial in terms of mutual intelligibility, collaboration and resource sharing, the dominance of English in international journals has created a host of challenges for multilingual scholars, especially those who come from peripheral countries.

    Last year, I took part in a project that focused on predatory publishing practices in academia. In short, predatory publishing refers to the unethical publishing practices of some journals (lack of peer-review, monetary exchange for guaranteed publication, etc.). We also looked at why authors decide to publish in these journals. For many academics, the pressure to publish is immense, as their institutions and their careers are dependent on the impact factor and the quantity of articles they produce in a year. However, due to the requirements and strict peer-review process of many high-impact international journals, many authors have found it difficult or nearly impossible to publish. And these authors have become a prime target for predatory journals. What we also found was that in these predatory journals, a large proportion of authors come from ‘peripheral countries’ – countries that are not in the Anglosphere.

    Predatory publishing is slowly becoming an important issue in academia, as it challenges the integrity of the scientific process. Any article published in these journals automatically becomes unreliable, as no one can be sure of its legitimacy. Furthermore, articles that references an article published in these journals are also impacted.

    One of the factors that contributed to this issue is the uneven participation of multilingual scholars. As you said, international journals are dominated by authors from the Anglosphere, and scholars from other regions are underrepresented. Coupled with the ‘publish or perish’ ideologies in some academic circles, this has created a publishing environment where authors have to turn to unreliable journals for the sake of their careers.

    Here are some articles that I collected in the project:

    Beall’s list of predatory journals: https://beallslist.net/
    Predatory Publishers: https://osc.cam.ac.uk/about-scholarly-communication/author-tools/considerations-when-choosing-journal/predatory-publishers
    Efficiency of “Publish or Perish” Policy—Some Considerations Based on the Uzbekistan Experience – https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/9/3/33/htm
    Multilingual scholars’ participation in core/global academic communities: A literature review – https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240450324_Multilingual_scholars'_participation_in_coreglobal_academic_communities_A_literature_review
    Multilingual Scholars’ Experiences in Publishing in the Social Sciences and Humanities – https://muse-jhu-edu.simsrad.net.ocs.mq.edu.au/article/797460
    Why do authors publish in predatory journals? – https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.simsrad.net.ocs.mq.edu.au/doi/full/10.1002/leap.1150
    Published and be damned – https://online-boneandjoint-org-uk.simsrad.net.ocs.mq.edu.au/doi/full/10.1302/0301-620X.101B5.BJJ-2018-1330.R1

    • Thanks, Bob, for all these references! More and more scholars, particularly in peripheral countries, as you say, are caught in a trap: they are required to publish for promotion, jobs, increasingly even to get Masters or PhD degrees; but they are not at all supported to be able to publish (or even to conduct research that is worth publishing …)
      Have you seen this article, btw – I think you might find it interesting:
      Piller, Ingrid. (2022). What exactly does an editor do? Multilingua. doi:doi:10.1515/multi-2022-0125

  • Tazin Abdullah says:

    Thank you for this important article, Ingrid!

    I remember how much I learnt from the Multilingua issue devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis.” One of the things that stood out about that issue was that before this, I had never had access to the researchers and their very valuable work. 🙂

  • Jinhyun Cho says:

    Thank you very much for drawing our attention to this important issue! These are structural inequalities and need collective citizenship (as you rightly pointed out) to be addressed. Anglo- and Euro-centrism are so deeply embedded in both our practice and our consciousness, and it is important to continue to raise awareness about this problem, which disproportionately affects scholars on the global periphery.

    • Thanks, Jinhyun! Beyond awareness raising, this is about practice and how much we’ve all benefited from working together on and through Language on the Move! And we are having fun, too 🙂

  • Laura SKh says:

    Congratulations to Jenny, Li Jia and Ingrid on yet another important publication, and on all you have accomplished together since 2012!

  • You’ve put up on your site a lot of my stuff that no other academic touches with a barge pole. Ingrid jaan, you’ve restored my faith in human beings! I never thought for a moment that my most recent brief note and its link would appear. As we old Aussie males still say here: ‘YOUR BLOOD’S WORTH BOTTLING’. I won’t abuse the privilege, and besides, it looks like we’re all in for it for a while, if you ask me, SOON

  • We do indeed have that moral duty, Ingrid, and besides, even if, as the Baha’i texts prophesy, the devastation of WW2 amounts to “a mere foretaste” of the suffering about to be unleashed, a few billion souls will probably survive and start a new civilization:
    https://www.bandeeducation.com/the-limbs-of-mankind-to-quake-la-membroj-de-la-homo-tremi

  • The 5% to 55% discrepancy, or DOMINANCE, that Ingrid rightly references in her second paragraph is no new phenomenon. With the passing of empires history records many a decline and demise, for example Latin and Manchu, and then the new empire’s language dominates . In modern times it’s fair to say, I feel, that the French are still gobsmacked at the global reach of the language of Shakespeare. Given a perfect storm now facing our civilization: a pandemic, global warming, the Anthropocene, species extinction, imminent hyperinflation, a wicked war in Europe yet again, as though General MacArthur’s prayer in Tokyo Bay were words written on water – is our unfair civilization perhaps entering its concluding years? What then are our children and grandchildren to make of today’s language dominating ‘the business of America’?

    Religion too is a player, good and bad, in the history and the influence of lingua francas (aka: linguae francae) when it comes to scholars ‘getting published’ in a ‘collaborative autoethnography’, perhaps best thought of by laypersons as ‘the shunning of linguistic biases’ or as ‘language rights’ cited in the UN’s famous Declaration of 1948. Notwithstanding the central tenet of ‘the oneness of humanity’, found over and over in the Baha’i faith’s canon, no religion outdoes the Anglophilic-Persophyllic bubble created by its leaders as individuals in the USA since just before World War 1 when a central Baha’i figure, Sir Abdul Baha Abbas, visited their country to promote ‘all through America’ the fundamental principle of a universal auxlang. (See, only on Instagram, in today’s comments at a ginormous blog in the USA, Bahai Teachings: Poetry, Hard Realities, and Our Approach to the Creator.) Ignoring new scholarship demonstrating the founder’s Esperantism in 1891 is a low point among Baha’i academics priding themselves on their faith’s teachings about justice and the duty to consult.

  • Li Jia says:

    Thanks for sharing this marvelous account with us. How time flies! I met you and Jenny for the first time in Wuhan in November 2012. That was ten years ago. Now we become co-workers fighting for global epistemic justice and creating possibilities for productive engagement between the Global North and the Global South. We expect more peripheral multilingual scholars joining us, challenging epistemological mindsets of global knowledge hierarchies and validating diverse intellectual knowledges.

    • Thank you, Li Jia! I have such fond memories of our first meeting: you singing a Yunnan folk song as part of your conference presentation was such a highlight 🤩

  • Pia Tenedero says:

    It is important to highlight the Global North-Global South gap in academic publishing space. I think part of the reason scholars based outside the Anglosphere struggle to have their voices heard is that many peer reviewers of most ‘high impact’ journals are US- and UK-based. I’m not sure that many of these gatekeepers consciously share the same concern about making academic publishing more globally inclusive and representative. Your collaboration with peers in China and elsewhere in the world are a big inspiration, Ingrid! I hope many follow this example.

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