Englishization as trap and lifeline

Abstract

In today’s Europe, internationalization is driven by three mutually reinforcing mechanisms: EU funding, rankings, and commodification. And it calls for Englishization because in most cases the learning of the local language by foreign students is too much to expect, whereas a powerful bottom-up ‘maximin’ dynamics generates such a wide dissemination of English that prior knowledge of it can be taken for granted. Is Englishization a problem? Of course it is, for several reasons. Yet there is no responsible path away from internationalization, nor any reasonable hope of achieving it without Englishization. We must therefore aim at a fragile balance between giving enough place to English not to fall behind and protecting local languages against slow agony.