Tuesday 29th January 2013 - The increasingly monolingual (English-speaking) university

Let me say loud and clear at the outset that I know times have changed.  I know that the linguistic skills of students are today, on average, less than in the past.  When I applied to go to university part of my interview at Exeter University (for Geography, note) was conducted in German. I had no knowledge that this was going to be the case until the day itself.  Being the last candidate to be interviewed (the dreaded alphabetism affecting those with surnames like mine), I found the interviewers delighted to quiz me in German because, as they told me, all the other candidates that afternoon had selected French.  I actually went to Oxford instead, but there we were all faced with a translation paper involving geographical texts in either French, German or Russian.  My reading list contained books in both French and German, and I remember reading a French text on physical geography, and even quoting from a German text (Ratzel, on organic views of nation-state growth) in my finals exams.  The library (and I am talking about the departmental library, not the Bodleian) contained books and journals in many languages.    I will also point out that I am not and never have been a natural linguist: I failed my German O level the first time round and although I passed French it was with a grade only marginally above a fail.  It was just that it was expected that a student studying a humanities or social science subject at that time would be able to read material drawn from perspectives other than that of the English-speaking world. (Science also used to require linguistic abilities: I have a nephew who had to take a German exam as part of his PhD in Chemical Physics at Edinburgh - and that's only 20 years ago.)

The academic language on the international stage has now become English.  Bibliographic databases and search engines prioritise English-language materials.  Google scholar rarely comes up with anything in another language.  Of great importance is the fact that the 'big deals' on journals only include English-language publications.  An outcome of this is that if I go to a university library in the UK now I find it virtually impossible to find any foreign language books on the shelves (except for language and literature students); where there were once foreign language periodicals, they have all now gone.

It is ture that in some ways there is now better access to foreign language materials than in the past - most especially through the internet.  Yet I find that few third year students realise that they can switch Google search into any number of other languages simply by replacing .co.uk with .de (German), .it (italian), .fr (French) and so on.  And they can put material found on foreign web sites through Google translate - which improves year by year.  We can get foreign language stuff on our smartphones - I have the apps for both Le Monde (French newspaper) and La Repubblica (Italy) on my iPhone and can scan those papers over breakfast for free (for the moment - I used to get Suddeutsche Zeitung until they restricted it to subscriptions only).  But none of this is represented in university libraries or standard information sources.

I think this is a shame for a number of reasons. I will give some of them via examples:
1. As an international university we welcome students from around the world.  Yet they cannot find any familiar materials to support their learning here.  A Chinese engineering student who wants to revise her or his understanding of a basic concept cannot do it through the language where they first learned it. It is as if all the prior learning, and the sound textbooks they learned from, have to be put on one side when they arrive here.
2. A visiting student who wants to write a project comparing a social situation in their home country with a similar situation in the UK can not get key materials on their homeland unless they have been translated into English and published by an English-language publisher.
3. Researchers are largely confined to interpretations from the English-speaking world.  Valid viewpoints from other language communities are much harder to access.
4. All students get the impression that it is only English that matters.  It is a form of cultural supremacism.

Whilst I lament these things I am pragmatic enough to recognise that relatively few English students today are competent in foreign languages (although I was delighted this semester when two of my students did a little project on the reporting of racism in Spanish newspapers).   Probably relatively few UK national staff have such competence, although the rapidly increasing numbers of staff recruited from elsewhere alomst certainly includes a high proportion of bilinguals.  And with the dominance of English language materials, the reduiction in student linguistic competence,  and tight squeezes on library budgets, it is completely understandable where the priorities lie for content purchase and journal subscriptions.

I suspect Sheffield is no different from the vast majority of UK universities in this respect. I am not 'having a go' at our library.  But I do wonder whether there might be scope for the librarians and information scientists of this country to come up with a strategy to ensure that international universities like ours can, in future, make more accessible the academic, cultural and other productions of language communities other than English.