The geolinguistics of English as an academic lingua franca: citation practices across English‐medium national and English‐medium international journals

To explore how the global status of English influences knowledge production and circulation, this paper focuses on citations in English-medium national and English-medium international journal articles. Drawing on text, ethnographic, and corpus data from a longitudinal study in four national contexts, we argue that citation practices vary significantly along geolinguistic lines – that is, in terms of who gets cited, where and by whom – and that such differences are highly consequential. We argue that multilingual scholars face particularly difficult decisions which can in part be understood as a tension between the politics of knowledge building and knowledge measuring. We conclude by calling for greater recognition of this tension in discussions about English as an academic lingua franca and in Anglophone centre gatekeeping practices.

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