English as a Scientific and Research Language

This series creates a space for innovative scholarship examining the ways language functions as a powerful meaning-making resource for constructing identities, managing relationships and building communities. Grounded in new, data-driven methodologies, quantitative and qualitative, and engaging a diverse range of communicative and textual practices, the series embraces work from variationist sociolinguistics through to discourse studies, linguistic anthropology and social semiotics. Monographs and edited volumes are welcomed, as is any work that explicitly situates language in its political, economic and cultural contexts, and/or intersects with other modes of communication such as visual images, material culture, space/place, and nonverbal communication.

The current series was conceived in 2015, but it actually emerged from two earlier book series also published by De Gruyter Mouton. Founded in 1999 by Richard Watts and Monica Heller as Language, Power and Social Process, the series ran until 2011 although Monica had stepped down in 2008. From 2011, the series continued under the new name Language and Social Processes, with David Britain joining Richard Watts as editor. When Richard stepped down at the end of 2014, Crispin Thurlow joined David as editor; this is when David and Crispin worked together on updating the series with an expanded, more contemporary scope and a more fitting title: Language and Social Life.

To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.

This volume examines the role of English in academic and research settings in Europe and provides recommendations on the challenges posed by the dominance of English over national languages as languages of science and research dissemination; the need for language support for academics that need to disseminate their research in English; and the effect of past and present language policies.