<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>
<br>
But to the larger point: Some Europeans may be proud of the various
other (European) languages they can read, but de facto, young
linguists are not competitive if they publish in other languages.
And certainly, papers in general linguistics usually have zero
impact if they are not written in English.<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>There are subfields of linguistics (maybe not general linguistics) where most publications are not in English, and where even English-language publications do not necessarily have the highest impact, though this may not be visible in bibliometrical counts (since many non-English sources are not even indexed in google scholar etc). This is certainly true for Chinese linguistics, Japanese (and Ryukyuan) linguistics, Romance linguistics, (perhaps still) Indo-European linguistics and probably other fields. Knowledge of the relevant languages is one of the basic requirements to do research in those fields.<br></div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>
Sad as it may be, this is the reality of the 21st century. We may
deplore it, but we will hardly be able to change it. (What we *may*
be able to do is change the name we use for our common language:
Globish.)<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I think that the beauty of linguistic diversity is the reason that motivates most people to do linguistics (at least it is the reason why I do it). As such, I believe that linguists as a community should not embrace the shrinking diversity of scholarly languages. In particular, community-oriented research (such as dictionaries and text collections -- which are as important, if not more, than grammars) should be accessible to native speakers and in my opinion should be written in the national language. Moreover, there are cases
when the use of English can be dangerous to non-native speakers (such as myself)
when making precise translations of example sentences (from either unwritten languages or from ancient languages) and expressing some fine semantic nuances, even for scholars who use English on a daily basis.</div><div><br></div><div>Guillaume<br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div>Guillaume Jacques<br>CNRS (CRLAO) - INALCO<br><a href="http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques" target="_blank">http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques</a><br><div><a href="http://panchr.hypotheses.org/" target="_blank">http://panchr.hypotheses.org/</a></div></div></div></div></div>