Reasons for describing universities’ linguistic capital

ABSTRACT

In the process of internationalization of universities, the articulation between local and global contexts depends on various factors including that of linguistic capital, that is to say, the sum of resources and language skills that allow stakeholders, teachers, researchers and students to participate in different levels of knowledge flows. To better understand how this works, the paper proposes some principles of analysis of knowledge flows, based on one of the author's interventions and expertise in academic fieldwork in South America, inspired by the concept of glottopolitics which highlights the impact of speakers as linguistic policy stakeholders whose linguistic activity should be considered in the strategic analysis of organizations. In conclusion, it is suggested that improved knowledge of available linguistic capital within universities will lead to better governance of internationalization strategies by managing language practices between local, regional and international languages.

KEYWORDS:

• Internationalization of universities
• linguistic capital
• concrete glottopolitical action system
• language knowledge flows‌

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Patrick Chardenet holds a PhD in Language Sciences and has been recruited as Associate Professor in Language Sciences at the Université de Franche Comté, France (2001). In 2005, he was seconded to the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie, where he held the position of Associate Director ‘Language and scientific communication in French’ (2005–2010 in Montreal). In 2011, he created the AUF branch for Latin America, in São Paulo (Brazil), of which he was director (until 2016). In 2018, he created the collection ‘Plurilingual Didactic Fields’, Peter Lang International Academic Publishers. His works about evaluation in language and about the effects of population and communication flows on language contacts and their didactic impacts in language learning were developed with CEDISCOR laboratory (Research Center on ordinary and specialized discourses) and ELLIAD laboratory (Edition, Literature, Languages, Computing, Arts, Didactics, Speech). Visiting Professor in Argentina and Brazil, he has been an evaluator of research projects for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and for the Fund for Scientific Research of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation of Belgium.

Karen Ferreira-Meyers is an Associate Professor and Coordinator (Linguistics and Modern Languages) at the Institute of Distance Education, University of Eswatini. She holds a PhD in Francophone literature, four Master's degrees (Romance Philology, English Linguistics, Instructional Design and Technology, Law), an Honours degree and several certificates in various domains. She regularly publishes and participates in international conferences related to her main research interests, namely teaching and learning of languages, distance and e-learning, translation and interpreting, African literature, autofiction and autobiography, crime and detective fiction. She is also a keen translator and interpreter.

Notes

1 Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). See also UNESCO https://fr.unesco.org/node/252288. [Last accessed 1 November 2019].

2 Classification according to International Monetary Fund and United Nations.

3 Source: 2015, UNESCO Science Report: towards 2030 (bibliometric data from the Thomson Reuters database, data processing by Science-Metrix).

4 Source: Idem.

5 Original text in French: ‘Ces réseaux de cosignataires montrent la coexistence d’échelles multiples de collaboration qui vont de l’intra-urbain (collaborations locales) à l’international en passant par le niveau national et macrorégional. Tous ces niveaux progressent aux dépens des articles écrits sans collaboration. En combinant donc l’analyse de structure (répartition de l’activité) et l’analyse des évolutions récentes, on constate que l’impact des phénomènes d’échelle nationale reste très important, sans que cela bien sûr ne vienne contredire les tendances à l’internationalisation de l’activité scientifique. ’

6 Source: News Feed EPRIST, 05/10/2016. Available at: https://www.eprist.fr/thomson-reuters-ip-science-devient-clarivate-analytics/ [Last accessed 06 December 2019].

7 The situation of certain large and prestigious university presses like Cambridge and Oxford University Press is unique because they make a profit (https://www.cambridge.org/about-us/media/press-releases/cambridge-university-press-announces-sales-and-revenue-growth). They even provide budget support to the university (£ 3m in 2017 https://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/2017-18/weekly/6489/section4.shtml). [Last accessed 06 December 2019].

8 SOHA project: SOHA- Science Ouverte Haïti Afrique, 2015–2017, Université Laval https://www.flsh.ulaval.ca/notre-faculte/repertoire-du-personnel/florence-piron [Last accessed 28 October 2019].

9 In sociolinguistics, an allophone is a person who has a mother tongue other than one of the many official languages in a given territory; allophony is then the situation that characterizes a group of allophones.

10 This hypothesis is also supported by what the authors have learned through their own experience participating in journal reading committees and as collection director receiving articles or books written in French or Spanish by non-native speakers.

11 CoLabTrad – Laboratoire de Traduction Collaborative. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1425860524146046/ and partnership project description with Universidade de São Paulo and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and with the support of Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie at https://usp-br.academia.edu/ProjetCoLabTrad [Last accessed 1 November 2019].

12 See Section 3 above: Universities’ linguistic capital: unknown data and black boxes.