Linguistic Injustice and Global English: Some Notes From Its Role in Academic Publishing

Abstract

In recent years, the position of English as the main language of international research publishing has become a growing source of language ideological debates within academia and most notably, of course, amongst Applied Linguists. In very short terms, there seems to exist a division between those who regard English as an agent of linguistic injustice for multilingual scholars, versus those who would place more emphasis on other, non-linguistic factors in accounting for the injustices perceived to exist in the publishing enterprise. In this article, summarising some of my own recent work on this topic, I suggest that looking at the issue as an ‘either-or’ is not only not useful, but it can also be counterproductive for our analyses. Instead, I propose we need to look at the question of English for research publication purposes as a ‘both-and’, meaning that both linguistic and non-linguistic factors have to be taken into consideration, and I sketch some ideas as to how that can be done.