Abstract:
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 decisionmakers, 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.
