2020 Volume 15 Issue 1-2 Pages 153-165
There is a belief that Francophone institutions and organisations are powerless to counter the attraction of academics towards the English language. According to many Francophone decision-makers, the expansion of the English language and its current supremacy in academia are largely driven by globalisation. This article questions this belief. In fact, drawing from two multilingual contexts, I will show that the demand for English stems from internal sociolinguistic dynamics. To support my stance, I will analyse some of the sociolinguistic dynamics in South Africa and Mauritius. More importantly, I will show that scholars should not conflate and confuse the expansion of the English language in science with the challenges of French-speaking academics. If, for example, Francophone institutions and organisations want to address the specific problem of the attraction of French-speaking academics for English academic journals, a safer approach would be to analyse how the English-speaking academic world is structured, what it offers and that Francophone academia does not offer. Pending such a comparative study, this article proposes that a number of initiatives be implemented in order to prevent the situation from becoming more difficult to manage in the future.
