"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 English is my second language. I don't think that a sort of tax to English speakers, as it's proposed in the article, would help me.
What would help me instead is to be able to use English to deal with the administration all throughout Europe.
I see English as the common identity language of non-native English speakers.
@cyrilpedia it’s not going to be a problem for very many more years, as English is already diverging to the point where some speakers find it difficult to understand each other. In another 50 or 100 years, certain forms of English will become verbally incomprehensible to others, and only the written word will be truly international.
It will go the same way as Latin, Arabic and mandarin.
@peterbrown EuropeanComissionSpeak is already an undecipherable language, English as conceived by MBAs and 'ENArques'.
@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.
@gpollara I like your idea of support, and there have been good programs that include this component.
@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.
@cyrilpedia One obvious remedy not mentioned is to get English-speaking countries - by international treaty or some such - to teach at least one other language to its citizens. And calling this only a 'cost' is seriously unserious: knowing two or more languages is *qualitatively* different from knowing only one.
https://www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/multilingual-practices/0/steps/22658