[Lingtyp] languages of scholarship

[Claire Bowern]

For what it's worth, *Diachronica* allows submissions in French, German, or
Spanish (as well as English) and we publish summaries of each article in
French and German. We are currently looking into adding Mandarin and
Spanish to the summaries (working out some logistical details). Of course,
that does not really help with the Eurocentrism issue, since (apart from
Mandarin) these are all European and colonial languages. The vast majority
of our submissions are in English, the German submissions are all from
Germany, the Spanish submissions are almost all from Central and South
America, and the French submissions are mostly from Francophone Africa.
Claire

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 3:00 PM Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>
wrote:

> It seems that there are two groups of people: the "defeatists" who
> realize that English/Globish has won, and the "romantics" who cherish
> linguistic diversity also when it comes to linguistics writings.
>
> I belong to the defeatists, also because I know that I owe my own career
> to my early switch to English (my 1993 dissertation on indefinite
> pronouns was the first linguistics dissertation written in English in
> Germany, and it helped me get a good job; nowadays few people write in
> German about general linguistics).
>
> So, sad as it is: Just as speakers of Sáliba or Japhug do not get good
> jobs without knowing another big language as well, linguists will hardly
> get good jobs unless they write in a big language. It's wonderful to
> hear about linguistics dissertations written in Quechua
> (
> http://www.openculture.com/2019/10/peruvian-scholar-writes-defends-the-first-thesis-written-in-quechua.html),
>
> but can this be much more than a symbolic act?
>
> Instead of talking about the languages we write in, we should perhaps
> talk about the way academia is organized. Why is it the case that people
> who write in small languages have fewer chances to get good jobs? What
> is it that discourages ambitious Latvian linguists from writing in Latvian?
>
> Why do I read in reviews that "X has published in excellent journals",
> and why is it that journals highlight their "impact factors"? Since this
> is a typology list: Why doesn't ALT object to De Gruyter's listing LT's
> impact factor
> (https://www.degruyter.com/view/journals/lity/lity-overview.xml), even
> though impact factors are widely thought to be damaging to science?
>
> So if we are serious about our wish to support small languages, even in
> linguistics writings, we should perhaps think about moving away from De
> Gruyter and setting up a linguistics journal that is open to many other
> languages. Maybe with our prestige as ALT, we can make a real
> difference. (It seems unlikely, but it may be worth trying.)
>
> Best,
> Martin
>
> --
> Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de)
> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
> Kahlaische Strasse 10
> D-07745 Jena
> &
> Leipzig University
> Institut fuer Anglistik
> IPF 141199
> D-04081 Leipzig
>
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