Analysis and news
What is a linguistic monopoly? Research institutions and funders need to be more aware of the phenomenon, writes Amer Abukhalaf
During the Second World War, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, gave a strong speech in Harvard on the 6th of September, 1943.
In his speech, he emphasised the unity
between the United States and the United Kingdom, and their plans for global peace- keeping. Churchill was one of the longest- serving politicians in British history, but also he was a Nobel Prize-winning writer who set the rules for a new global dominance using the English language. In the same speech, Churchill said: ‘This
gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance… but I don’t see why we shouldn’t try to spread our common language even more widely throughout the globe… the power to control language offers far better prizes than taking away people’s provinces or lands or grinding them down in exploitation. The empires of the future are the empires of the mind,’ which is why the speech was called the ‘The English Empire of the Mind’ speech. The power of using colonial languages, such as French and English, is clear through history; it is what still ties India to the United Kingdom, and Algeria to France. However, using the power of language purposely to control people’s intellectuality around the world to stay head and shoulders above them was, for sure, something unseen before. And this is what I refer to in this article as a linguistic monopoly. After the Second World War, Churchill
became the Prime Minister of UK for the second time, from 1951 to 1955. His vision of an English language global dominance became more of a plan, starting with academic and research institutions. The
20 Research Information August/September 2021
plan was achievable and English gradually became the world’s global language, and mainly because of the power held by the people who spoke it, which was no longer limited to politics and military, but also financial and economic power. No one can deny that the dominance of the English language in academia has many cost-saving and logistic benefits. Still, we should also be aware of the imbalances in the system created by such dominance, and how it jeopardises the quality of research around the globe. Nowadays, most scholars worldwide
are forced to publish their work in English if they want to be recognised by the global academic society. If English is your native
‘If English is your native language, you hold a position of unjustified superiority over others’
language, you hold a position of unjustified superiority over others. Scholars who don’t have the ability to publish their work in English, no matter how good their work is, their voices aren’t being heard, their work is being overlooked, and they are being excluded from the international debate. This also happens on an institutional level. For example, the universities that don’t have the ability to meet these linguistic expectations are severely ill-funded, with almost no publications, no grants and no recognition. This can be seen as linguistic discrimination against scholars.
But when we force scholars to research and publish their work in their second languages, putting the game of power aside, what does this linguistic monopoly mean for research quality? To answer that, we need to get a little bit heavy on the relationship between language processing and the human mind.
The consequences of linguistic monopoly in academic research Our life has been getting more complex little by little every day, and so a new attitude toward languages became necessary to make the communication process faster and more effective. It is easy to realise how your linguistic skills as a scholar can affect your daily life due to technical reasons; for example, Google only deals with 103 languages among 7,000 languages around the world, so if you don’t speak one of these languages at least, you won’t have the luxury of Google. Similarly, the majority of articles on Wikipedia are written in less than six languages, so if you don’t speak one of them at least, almost the whole content of Wikipedia isn’t accessible for you. Speaking a second language is one of the strongest sources of individual differences for human beings. To become fluent in a second language, it takes 15 to 20 years of full-time study for that language, which is rarely the case for any of the scholars who publish in their second language. Many studies have been conducted to explore the bilingual mind. Some researchers investigated the bilingual mind clinically, while others did it psychologically. Recent studies show that second language processing is mentally depleting,
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