Negotiating space for multilingualism in English-medium writing: authors, reviewers, editors

Abstract

The role of the individual agency in the shaping of academic discourse cannot be under-estimated. The Oxford English Dictionary contains 788 citations from the writings of the seventeenth-century doctor and polymath Sir Thomas Browne, who drew on his knowledge of Latin to coin numerous neologisms which are used today in both scienti fi c and everyday English (e.g. electricity, medical, suicide, compensate, prairie, coexistence, coma, hallucination, carnivorous, migrant , ferocious , etc.). Brown ’ s (trans)linguistic creativity was truly exceptional, but resorting to classical languages, such as Latin and Ancient Greek without providing translations, used to be commonplace among humanities scholars well into the twentieth century. We do not need to go far in search for examples: Chal-mers (1936) article titled ‘ Sir Thomas Browne, true scientist ’ contains numerous examples of such code-meshing. Likewise, mixing di ff erent varieties of English has exercised a rhetorical function in academic discourse. In his seminal paper ‘ Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics ’ (1936, reprinted 1983), J.R.R. Tolkien, then Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and creator of multilingual Middle-Earth, resorts to Chaucer ’ s Middle English to make a self-e ff acing remark comparing himself to his learned audience: and though it may seem presumption that I should try with swich a lewed mannes wit to pace the wisdom of an heep of lerned men , in this department there is at least more chance for the lewed man . (Tolkien 1983, 5 – 6) Such rhetorical strategies used to be markers of elite multilingualism 1 , indexical of huma-nistic scholarly traditions and knowledge of the canonical authors and texts. From the perspective of western scholarship, elite multilingualism in academic writing has involved the use of classical or high-prestige modern languages (e.g. French and German), which the authors acquired strati