Bringing into focus multilingual realities: Faculty perceptions of academic languages on campus

The widespread use of English in academia has been reported to have detrimental effects on other academic languages and to pose considerable language problems to those scholars that use English as an Additional Language. This paper, however, seeks to bring into focus the functionality of English along with that of other academic languages for campus-wide internationalization. Using data from semi-structured interviews with university faculty, the paper examines the plurilingual practices of a localized disciplinary community in a non-Anglophone academic setting. The data show that while several causal and intervening conditions promote English in the domain of research communication, context-specific factors support the use of Spanish in the domain of education. Regarding the spoken mode, faculty accounts of language-related phenomena (language mixing, translanguaging and parallel language use) reveal complex multilingual interactions. Furthermore, their accounts of informal academic interactions and of features of English as a Lingua Franca confirm that they communicate effectively in English with other academics even if their English does not fully conform to the English Native Language norms. Given that macro-level (institutional) language policies have a dramatic impact on language practices, we advocate effective language planning and management to preserve and enhance plurilingualism on campus.