Rough Work session with Xuewen Yan, Ph.D. student, sociology

The popularity and prestige of the English language in Chinese academia: A missing link in the hegemony of English as lingua franca?

Xuewen Yan writes: With the rise of English as the global language, scholars across the social sciences have long queried the hegemonic power of the English language in the academic world. Most often, sociologists and critical linguists have examined the active dominance or relative privileges of native speakers of English, vis-à-vis the subordination and disadvantage of those from non-English speaking countries. In this study, I theorize a potentially different mechanism in the maintenance of the hegemony of English: actors in non-English speaking countries attach prestige and value to the use of English within their own country, whereby the dominance of English over their native language is perpetuated. I plan to test my theory with the empirical example of China's sociological academia. Currently working on data from a flagship Chinese-language sociology journal, shehuixue yanjiu, I expect to find higher valence associated with English as opposed to Chinese-related indicators. At the level of individual papers, my preliminary analysis shows that publications with more English-language references receive more citations themselves, an effect that one does not observe for Chinese-language references. At the author level, I hypothesize that having professional connections to English will be a strong predictor of higher influence within China's sociology community.

ROUGH WORK: Discussing research in progress, hence the term, rough work. This rough work session is hosted by the East Asia Program's Graduate Student Steering Committee (GSSC).