Not so very long ago, Samuel Huntington (1996: 60) summarily dismissed the argument that English is ‘the world’s language’. A language that is foreign to 92% of the world’s population, he pointed out, cannot in the most basic sense be the world’s language. The extensive research published – in English – on the role of English as the global language of academe occasionally overlooks this fact. In the field of governance, Huntington (1996: 57) notes, there exists an English-speaking elite of key actors from almost every country that shares cultural values related to ‘individualism, market economies, and political democracy’, which he names ‘The Davos Culture’. The globally mobile non-Western members of this elite co-exist or, better, ‘super-exist’ with the people of their own countries, who live on a day-to-day basis according to often quite different canons of values. While this tiny minority wields enormous power, it is in no way representative of the vast majority of the world’s population, either culturally or linguistically.

Similar concerns about the isolation and unrepresentativeness of an English-speaking international academic elite drive this chapter. Scholarship has addressed the difficulties of publishing in English as a second language (L2; e.g. Flowerdew, 2008; Ge, 2015), the skewing of power relations in favor of English native speakers in the Anglophone center (e.g. Lillis & Curry, 2010: Ch. 6; Salager-Meyer, 2008) and measures that might affect them (e.g. Curry & Lillis, 2013). Simultaneously, another strand of discourse has addressed the concern that scholars do not engage sufficiently with the world beyond academe (e.g. Biswas & Kirchherr, 2015; Schöller et al., 2015). And in a world where the vast majority of the population still either cannot effectively or do not normally operate in English, publications in English have limited impact (cf. Biswas & Kirchherr, 2015). Despite the importance of supranational bodies such as the European Union (EU), many key policy debates continue to be resolved at national levels and in national languages (de Swaan, 2000).