Multilinguismo nas ciências ambientais: Ahora ya! (Multilingualism in Environmental Sciences: It’s About Time!)

Comment to: Bortolus, A. 2012. Running like Alice and losing good ideas: On the quasi-compulsive use of English by non-native English speaking scientists. AMBIO 41: 769–772. doi: 10.1007/s13280-012-0339-5.

Writing in Ambio, Bortolus (2012) recently argued that many non-native English-speaking environmental scientists invest a disproportionate amount of time in over-coming language barriers, limiting the impact of their research, and constraining their productivity. While it may be inevitable and possibly desirable that one language dominates academic communication, most native English-speaking academics never need to adapt to a work environment dominated by another language, and may not appreciate the magnitude of this problem.

We are both English language native speakers (US and UK) who have lived and worked for several years in South America (Chile and Brazil). Like many “expat scientists,” our experiences have given us new perspectives on the importance of language in science....