Isn't English the common academic language?

Question

In a question about university ranking, many people mentioned that language is a privilege for better ranking of English speaking countries.

Isn't a decent fluency in English the requirement for senior academic positions (regardless of native languages)?

Most ranking factors are about research activities. If a professor in non-English speaking country is not fluent in English, how does he supervise graduate students? For supervising/conducting cutting-edge research, someone should be able to read technical literature. Research papers are published in English (and there is no translation normally).

Most non-English speaking countries with excellent higher education (such as Scandinavia, Netherlands, Switzerland) offer the graduate programs in English.

I understand it is easier for native English speakers to read and write in scientific literature, but we don't speak their language, we speak an international language, which is their native language too.

I understand that this requirement is neglected in many countries, but is it reasonable and justifiable to give a senior academic position to someone who cannot read 99% of recent research findings in his field?

Is it acceptable for a professor or even a PhD student to have no understanding of English language? To avoid confusion, consider STEM fields.

Answer 1

In this answer, I will respond to some of the points raised in the question, however without any expectation of completeness.

Isn't a decent fluency in English the requirement for senior academic positions (regardless of native languages)?

To some extent, it is, although there are probably many different interpretations of what "decent fluency" means around.

If a professor in non-English speaking country is not fluent in English, how does he supervise graduate students?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but ... simply in their non-English language? There is no general requirement that communication with graduate students (including foreign graduate students!) would have to happen in English.

For supervising/conducting cutting-edge research, someone should be able to read technical literature. Research papers are published in English (and there is no translation normally).

This is true, however I have noticed that there can be extremely wide gaps between the ability to read and understand complicated English texts and the ability to express complex ideas in English. Hence, a capable researcher can be perfectly able to understand technical literature written in English, and yet be unable to publish their own ideas in English.

Of course, this is not generally the case in all non-English-speaking places, but it probably depends on how English is trained or learned.

I understand it is easier for native English speakers to read and write in scientific literature, but we don't speak their language, we speak an international language, which is their native language too.

If it is their native language, too, then we do speak their language. Whether our motivation for learning or using English is to communicate with native speakers or with the international community doesn't matter; the result is that, as you say, "it is easier for native English speakers to read and write in scientific literature".

is it reasonable and justifiable to give a senior academic position to someone who cannot read 99% of recent research findings in his field?

As explained above, comprehension is not necessarily the same as expression. And even then, this statement possibly neglects that some fields might rely less on English than what I am used to from CS.

Is it acceptable for a professor or even a PhD student to have no understanding of English language?

No, rather not.

Coming back to your titular question:

Isn't English the common academic language?

Yes, in many fields, it is. But this mere fact has little influence on the effects you allude to. It neither means that English material is inaccessible to someone with low skills at writing in English, nor that ideas and surveys are always developed and conducted in English from the start.

Answer 2

Right now, the state of our civilization happens to be such that English is the dominant international language in science. This is a recent phenomenon, however. For example, less than a century ago, science was split fairly evenly between German, French, and English. Before that, up until the 19th century, Latin was the dominant language of science, and before that there was no global dominant language, but regionally dominant languages, e.g., Arabic, Hindustani, Chinese, Latin, Greek.

As a practical matter right now, world-class scholars need to be able to effectively interact with English, just as previously they would have needed to interact also in German and French or before that in Latin. Not every act of scholarship needs to be playing on the world stage, however, and there are many regional communities. In STEM fields, I have most often encountered this in Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and French (all having major recent independent scholastic histories).

Looking forward, will English remain the dominant language?

• Network effects mean that once a standard becomes "locked in," it is very difficult to change. See, for example, the QWERTY keyboard. By default, then, we should expect English to remain dominant for a long time.

• If there is a major shift of international order, however, such that a non-English language becomes the lingua franca in other areas, it could enable a transition similar to what happened in the past, when scholarship moved away from Latin into a poly-lingual state, and thence to English.

• Finally, if automated translation improves sufficiently, then language may become less of a barrier to communication. I doubt this will happen within the next decade, but it could easily happen within a century.

Bottom line: English is dominant, but that doesn't necessarily mean one has to use it now, nor that it will remain dominant in the future.

Answer 3

Isn't a decent fluency in English the requirement for senior academic positions (regardless of native languages)?

For STEM fields, generally yes, but there are are other fields, especially in the humanities (e.g. literature, history, architecture), where the majority, if not all, of the publications are written in the local language. In addition, in these fields, books instead of journals are the typical publication venue, and these books are frequently written in the local language.

Think of a historian specializing in the local history of a tiny village located somewhere in nowhere: would their publication language be English or the Somewhere one?

Indeed, whatever the field (even in STEM fields), being able to, at least, read publications in several languages is always an advantage, and I generally suggest to learn at least a second language. Even in publications written in English, one can frequently find references to works in German or French, more rarely Russian and Spanish, for which translations are not available. I've found many fine technical books (maths, physics) written in languages other than English.

Answer 4

Universities in English-speaking countries have an advantage in rankings precisely because English is the most common academic language. Native English speakers also have an advantage in most fields, but that advantage is quite negligible, when compared to the advantage the universities have.

The advantage comes from attracting talent from abroad. If you're a person moving to another country, you probably have much easier time settling in, if you already speak the language. Because far more academics speak English than (let's say) French or German, academics tend to choose job offers from the US or the UK over equally attractive offers from France or Germany. As the top universities in English-speaking countries have access to a wider talent pool than the top universities in the rest of the world, their research tends to be of higher quality.

Answer 5

While I agree that being able to understand and express your ideas in English is important for an academic career, much of the discussion supporting English so far has focussed on Europe and the question appears to come from that perspective. In fact, I would argue that there is much good STEM work now being done in China, and the Chinese journals are becoming much more important as Chinese based researchers are less likely to publish in English generally. This is similar to the Russian mathematics developments last century.

Answer 6

Isn't a decent fluency in English the requirement for senior academic positions (regardless of native languages)?

For all I know, I can imagine a very senior and experienced researcher teaching and doing research in his own language, and having his assistants/students translate and review the latest English-language articles in his field. Even more, he can publish articles in English, if he's the one to propose ideas and another person is the one to lay them out.

Answer 7

Isn't a decent fluency in English the requirement for senior academic positions (regardless of native languages)?

Let me answer your question plainly:

לא, יש אנשים שמתקבלים כחברי סגל אקדמי באוניברסיטאות ישראליות ואינם מסוגלים לנהל שיחה באנגלית. הדוקטורט שלהם לא נכתב בשפה האנגלית, הם לא השתלמו השתלמות בתר-דוקטורטית באנגלית, וכן הלאה.‏

You see?

No, there are people who are faculty members at Israeli universities and are unable to converse in English. Their dissertation is not written in English, they do not do post-doctoral training in English, and so on.