‘Linguistic snobbery’ in peer review ‘hurts new researchers’

Anglophone academics’ dismissive attitude towards non-native English speakers’ authorship is little different from the “snobbish” elitism that favours private school-educated undergraduates over their less moneyed peers, a new paper suggests.

Michael Mu, a Chinese-Australian sociologist at Adelaide University, says “Anglophone academia” is largely oblivious to the “power imbalances” embedded in native English speakers’ innate sense of linguistic superiority.

But the imbalances loom large in “biting critiques” from peer reviewers who lambaste academics like Mu for their “stilted English” that “reads like parody” and would benefit from a “professional proofreading service”.

Writing in the latest update to The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Mu invited colleagues to “open an intellectual debate to deconstruct and reconstruct language practices in Anglophone academia”.

“Without a reflexive critique of the snobbery being (ab)used under the cover of double-blind review, Anglophone academia risks unconsciously and continuously holding back those lacking…linguistic capital, not because of the quality of the scholarship but simply because of the register in which it is written.”

Mu said academics should be able to produce correct grammatical expression, irrespective of their background, and that constructive comments aimed at improving clarity were welcome. But some reviewers “crossed the line” by “demeaning” work that did not fit the “dominant” academic style.

“Sometimes it’s really not about scholarship,” he told Times Higher Education. “It’s about the colour of the language. Reviewers…sense that you are not speaking English as your first language. They believe there’s only one way of using academic English. It becomes a review of your language in the name of peer review of your scholarship.”

He said many native English-speaking academics were unaware of the linguistic arrogance operating within scholarly publishing. Yet it was so strong that reviewers had even asked him to remove references to his prior publications in Chinese academic literature.

“This is a real problem. I’m quite advanced in my career now, so…it doesn’t hurt me any more, but it hurts PhD students [and] early career researchers. We need to push back. We need to let more people know. We have to do something about it.”

The article suggests that peer review operates as a form of professional protectionism for academics with the favoured linguistic skills. It is “an adherence to relations of order which...are accepted as self-evident”, Mu writes, citing French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

Bourdieu, who grew up speaking an obscure Romance language from the Pyrenees and was “apparently taunted at boarding school for his accent”, had no patience with linguistic snobbery. He “chastised academics for judging their students’ work against a rigidly scholastic linguistic register, favouring socially advantaged students whose writing appeared polished and marking down those suffering from social handicaps”.

Judgements of linguistic style occur “implicitly or explicitly at every level of the educational system” including “all university careers, even scientific ones”, the article says. Judges are seldom held to account by those they judge. “I am not allowed to directly communicate with the reviewers given the double-blind review policy,” Mu observed.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com