"The most important challenge is that of fairness or “linguistic justice”. A common language is a bit like a telephone network: the more people know a language, the more useful it becomes to communicate. The question of fairness arises because individuals face very different costs to access the network and are on an unequal footing when using it. Those who learn English as a second language incur learning costs, while native speakers can communicate with all network members without incurring such costs. It’s like getting the latest smartphone model and sim card with unlimited data for free."
@cyrilpedia thanks for sharing. There is a clear advantage to your first (or at least best, as in my case) language is the predominant one in your professional field.
Nevertheless I feel uncomfortable at the idea we redress the balance through a system of penalties on the dominant language. Better to support the non-native speaker. For example for grant applications, funder could provide linguistic advice to non-native speaker applicant. (an idea I only thought of now typing this!)
@gpollara I think that there is a parallel track: evaluation systems have to also take into account native language research and knowledge production. Some of these will be great solutions to local problems - say dealing with soil conditions in the Cerrado or endemic disease research that should not penalize automatically scientists who publish at least some of their work in the native language. More pernicious, and something I have unwittingly contributed to in the past running PhD programs, is English as a selection step in so many international programs. It does make things easier at every level. But a very insidious idea takes hold that English language fluency is itself a scientific skill, which then gets folded into the "excellence" narratives. For my home country of Brazil, English fluency is a straightforward marker for socioeconomic status.
@cyrilpedia very insightful comment that re the relationship between English speaking and socioeconomic status. Not surprising, but important to remember. And I really like your point about English fluency being interpreted as scientific excellence.
@cyrilpedia @gpollara this is so important, reviewing papers and some reviewers rejecting submissions as english language skill not perfect, perhaps some other points but nothing that could not be overcome with some support, otherwise great interesting data, important messages etc will not be published in english and you have even more biased english lit evidence
@cyrilpedia @Kaetchi yes I think you're right,good point.
@gpollara @Kaetchi I can tell you from the side of manuscript services & editing, the drop in demand for basic editorial services (the ones that involve correcting language issues and general paper structure) in 2023 has been absolutely brutal. For some of my colleagues, it's been 2/3 of their work just evaporated.
@gpollara I like your idea of support, and there have been good programs that include this component.