This chapter focuses on the linguistic variable in research activities, along with attendant considerations such as the provenance of research publications and the status of native and non-native speakers of English, today's premier research language. As it has turned out, these have become increasingly complex issues. Part of the reason for this derives from the trends outlined in Chapter 1, but another part comes from the difficulty in reading the available research on these topics. Whereas the number of publications devoted to the linguistic variable (and its consequences) has rapidly expanded over the last decade, the studies reflect the epistemologies and methodologies of many different disciplines and so are hard to consolidate in a fully coherent manner. Finally, the issue of the role of English in research is politically and ideologically contested (for fully understandable reasons), and this further complicates the picture. This chapter then represents my “best shot” at mapping difficult terrain.

The Language of Journals

In Chapter 6 of Genre Analysis, I produced some quantitative data to argue against an overwhelming Anglophone supremacy in research articles, and concluded: