in defense of a multilingual political science

Abstract

Linguistic diversity and multilingualism have implications for our understanding of politics that should be debated more thoroughly in connection with key epistemological and methodological issues in political science. Finding an appropriate approach to the linguistic frame of all political activities, and of the analysis of these activities, remains a crucial concern for those scholars in our discipline who are convinced that understanding politics requires understanding political culture, and that political cultures tend to overlap to a significant extent with linguistic cultures. From this perspective, the dominance of English in scholarly communication at the global level must be counterbalanced by a strong commitment to fostering and sustaining a multilingual ethos in our immediate academic environment.