Sentence openings in academic economics articles in English and Danish

Abstract

Scandinavians have always had to use a second language to communicate with their peers. In hard science developments have long been international and it has been important for results to reach an international community of academic peers. In the last fifty years globalisation and professionalisation have affected many other academic fields (such as medicine and economics) in such a way that publication directed to a local community, including those involved in practice, has been downgraded relative to those which reach an international academic community (Kærgård 1998, Petersen and Shaw 2002). Simultaneously academic leadership has passed to the US along with leadership in other fields. The consequence is that all over the world academics feel pressure to write in English, as the language of the US, or be ignored.