In Which Language Should You Write Your Academic Research?
As a French scholar, I’ve had to deal since the beginning of my career with the following difficult question: in which language should I write my research? French people tend to be proud of their language and many of my French academic colleagues (seem to) feel committed to the idea that it is their role to contribute to its preservation and eventually to its diffusion. When I started my Ph.D. back in 2005, virtually all theses in economics were written in French and though many French economists were of course already publishing in English in international academic journals, there was still a strong habit to publish in French language in – by definition – non-international journals. Fifteen years later, things have changed significantly. More and more Ph.D. theses are written in English. As a result, young French scholars in economics are completely used to write and publish in English. Yet, the main French economic journal, the Revue économique,* still doesn’t accept manuscripts written in English by scholars from French-speaking countries. But this is nothing compared to other disciplines, as for instance philosophy, where I would say that way more than ninety percent of the academic production by French scholars is in French.
As far as I’m concerned, my view on this issue has always remained the same: considering that the point of the academic endeavor is to produce and disseminate ideas that have a (tiny) chance to change our worldview and our practices, they should be written under the form that maximizes their chance to be understood and assimilated by others. Of course, writing in a language that is not one’s mother tongue is extremely difficult. This is especially so in disciplines where conceptual precision and finesse are absolute requirements to express ideas and propositions. I remember my frustration when I started to try to write in English, being unable to express properly what I had in mind – in French of course. Things get better with experiences and practice, but it is unclear to me that it is possible to achieve the same deep understanding of a written language that is not one’s native language. As I use to say to my PhD students (whom I obviously encourage to write their thesis in English), a big step is made the day you will no longer think in French but directly in the language you are writing in.
Granting that this difficulty is real, it is surely not a valid reason to write your academic research solely in your mother tongue. What are then the other plausible reasons to refrain from writing in the language that is the most susceptible to maximize the chance of dissemination of your ideas? Across the years, I’ve essentially met two such reasons:
a) There are specific niche topics that are relevant only for a small and well-identified x-speaking part of the scientific community, where x is obviously not the dominant language.
b) Writing in one’s mother tongue is part of a collective endeavor to preserve cultural and linguistic diversity and/or the culture and language of one’s country/community/…
I think reason (a) is plausible and acceptable. Assume you’re writing on a specific issue related to the effects of a public policy in a sector the organization of which has strong national peculiarities. Most of the scholars interested in this issue will be nationals speaking the local language. It makes sense to write in the local language. There are two caveats, however. First, that doesn’t mean that it is worthless to write about the topic also in English, for there must probably be general lessons that are relevant to every scholar working in the field. Second, it is in fact very difficult to come with concrete and convincing examples of such niche topics where it is obvious that writing in the dominant language is useless. That doesn’t mean that they don’t exist, just that they may be far less numerous than proponents of this reason generally assume.
The second reason is the most frequent one I’ve encountered. That should not be a surprise, given how many French persons, including academics, are attracted by the idea of the “exception culturelle”. Broadly, the idea is that – at least from the French point of view – there is something special with French language and culture that makes them worth preserving against the influence of foreign languages and cultures. Whatever one may think about the intrinsic value of French language and culture, I see several problems with this argument. First, it is French-centered, to say the least. I don’t know to what extent we find it in other academic national environments, but as such this is an argument that is difficult to universalize. There is no more pro tanto reason to preserve French rather than Italian or Portuguese, for instance. The fact of being French is not as such a reason to give more importance to French, except if one argues that French as a language is part of one’s identity and that one highly values this identity. This reason cannot be discarded straightforwardly. We can accept that, has a member of some community, someone values the fact of endorsing and preserving what is constitutive of her community-membership. But this should be put into the balance with what is the main function of the academic endeavor: to produce and spread ideas that may change our worldview and our practices. This is fundamentally a universalistic endeavor that, I think, should prevail over the more communitarian considerations. Preserving linguistic diversity rather than a specific language is then a better reason to write in one’s mother tongue. Nonetheless, the same weighing issue happens again: the primary function of the academic endeavor is not to preserve linguistic diversity, even if it is a consideration that may play a secondary role in its organization.
Anyways, there is a second problem with the diversity argument: from a consequentialist point of view, the efforts coming from the academic world to preserve linguistic diversity are useless. They are useless for two reasons. Within the academic world, the battle is already lost. The evolution of a dominant language responds to the dynamic of a coordination game; once we are above some threshold, the mechanisms of (social) evolution will push the society toward the corresponding corner equilibrium where everyone speaks the same language. Only a massive collective action can possibly change the equilibrium, but it is obviously very unlikely to happen. It is also useless because the causes of linguistic domination are for the most part located outside the academic world. The domination of the English language in the academia is just the symptom of massive economic, political, and cultural domination by the English-speaking world. Writing academic research in one’s mother tongue to preserve it is like treating the headache due to a fatal disease with paracetamol.
There is actually one last reason for writing in one’s mother tongue which I have more difficulty assessing. It can be argued that each language has specificities that make it particularly fit to express specific ideas and make nuances that escape the scope of other languages. Obviously, there are words in some languages (say, German) that express notions difficult to convey in English. Experts in Emmanuel Kant’s or Max Weber’s scholarship are well placed to realize this. I think that the argument is in general valid, even though I tend to believe that the instances where it is relevant are very few. And again, there is a tradeoff consideration to be accounted for here. Suppose that by using a non-dominant language Y you can express an idea I that will be accessible to N persons. The alternative is to use the dominant language X where you will only be able to approximate I by developing ideas I’, I’’… and that will be accessible to 1000N persons. Considering that the more persons have access to your ideas, the more chance there is that they will be refined and perfected by yourself, or by others. What is the best from the point of view of the (academic) universe?
*Disclaimer: I’m a member of the scientific committee of the Revue économique.