Parallel language use in academic and outreach publication: A case study of policy and practice

• Results are derived from a data set combining questionnaires, interviews, a database trawl and text analysis.
• The language of publication is primarily determined by extra-institutional forces.
• Informants' practices suggest a functional distribution between the local and other languages.
• Language use is pragmatically rather than ideologically determined.

Parallel language use has been accepted as the guiding principle for university language policy writers in the Nordic region. However, the extent to which parallel language use reflects the actual publication practices of academics is yet to be established. This study begins to address the gap by investigating the languages used for academic and outreach publication in three departments at a major Swedish university. Questionnaire and database trawl results reveal that English, Swedish and other languages are used for academic and outreach publication, although Swedish dominates in the outreach domain. Furthermore, results derived from semi-structured interviews with 15 informants suggest that language practices are primarily determined by pragmatic forces such as intended audience, publication outlet, topic and genre, rather than by ideological or language-political factors.