Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet, Shirley Carter-Thomas. Scientific Conference Englishes: Epistemic and language community variations. G. Cortese; A. Duszak. Identity, Community, Discourse: English in Intercultural Settings, Peter Lang, pp.295-320, 2005, 3-03910-632-5.

Scientific Conference Englishes Epistemic and Language Community Variations

In many fields, English has now become the international lingua franca of communication. This shift in the status of Englishfrom being the property of a homogeneous speech community and the vehicle for its national culture, to that of a globally shared means of communicationhas given rise to a considerable body of critical literature, ranging from resistance to what is felt to be linguistic hegemony (e.g. Canagarajah 1999) to the defence of indigenised World Englishes in the outer circle (Kachru 1992), to, more recently, investigation of the specific characteristics of ELF in the expanding circle (Mauranen, this volume; Knapp & Meierkord 2002). One area where English is now well established as the global lingua franca is science. However, due perhaps to the still enduring legacy of the empiricist vision of science as universal truth, the implications of this shift for scientific communication have been largely ignored, as if science were curiously immune to the sources of cultural and linguistic variation so amply documented in other areasas if only ‘scientific English’, and not ‘scientific Englishes’, existed. This is understandable insofar as scientific genres are not the product of any single national speech community, but have developed in response to the epistemological and communicative needs of the disciplines. Indeed, it is widely recognized that irrespective of the text producer’s native language, disciplinary needs and textual genres exert a strong normative influence in academic research communities on the realization of the discourse. This begs the question, however, whether the epistemic community, rather than the speech community, may not be an equally powerful source of variation in the way English is used for international scientific communication. In this light, the Englishes of science would be the result of the differing ‘views of the world’ (Hilgevoord 1994; see also Wood 1997) that scientific