[Lingtyp] languages of scholarship

[David Gil]

Dear all,

Like Martin I am a "defeatist", except that I don't really think it's 
that bad a state of affairs.

Looking at things from a somewhat broader perspective, we are clearly in 
a transition to a Global era where more and more things are being done 
on a global scale. Kids in Indonesia play online interactive electronic 
games with kids from America and Africa, and of course they interact in 
rudimentary Globish.  Ditto training sessions in top football clubs 
employing star players from all over the world, ditto the international 
space station, ditto Max Planck Institutes, so why not also scientific 
publications?  All of these and many others constitute collective 
endeavors which require a common language — and English is the 
inevitable (albeit historically accidental) choice. If an earlier era 
witnessed the rise of national languages alongside regional ones, we are 
now in an era where the world village needs its own language, and the 
obvious choice is English (whether or not we decide to call it Globish — 
I quite like the idea myself). And just as national languages call for 
bilingualism, and often offer an unfair advantage to native speakers of 
the national language, so the rise of global English points towards a 
new norm of trilingualism, with, again, an unfair advantage to persons 
whose native language happens to be English.  Yes, we need to find ways 
to help our friends whose native language is not English, just as, for 
some time now, we have needed to help those whose native language is not 
their national one.  But I really don't see any alternative to English 
as the global language.

David

On 26/06/2020 21:57, Martin Haspelmath 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
>
-- 
David Gil
  
Senior Scientist (Associate)
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
  
Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-556825895
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091