[Lingtyp] languages of scholarship

[Guillaume Jacques]

>
> 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.
>

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.


> 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.)
>

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.

Guillaume



-- 
Guillaume Jacques
CNRS (CRLAO) - INALCO
http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques
http://panchr.hypotheses.org/
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