Open the table of contents of almost any high-profile international journal and one feature is so consistent that it has become invisible: the work is in English. Over decades, English has settled into place as the de facto language of international scholarly communication, and the convenience of a shared language has come at a price that is only now being widely examined. Research conducted, taught and applied in dozens of other languages is systematically disadvantaged in a system that rewards publishing in English; knowledge of profound local relevance becomes harder to find and cite; and researchers whose first language is not English carry an additional, unrecognised burden simply to take part. Language equity is the effort to recognise this imbalance and to build a scholarly system that values multilingualism rather than quietly penalising it. It sits squarely within the knowledge equity domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.
The costs of an English-only system
The dominance of English is not neutral. It shapes what counts as significant research, because the venues with the greatest prestige publish in English, and it shapes whose work is seen, because indexing, discovery and citation flow most readily to English-language outputs. The consequences fall unevenly. Research with strong local or regional importance — in public health, agriculture, law or the humanities, where context is everything — may be most useful in the language of the community it concerns, yet that very choice can render it invisible in international assessment. Researchers working in other languages face a stark choice between their local audience and international recognition, and the labour of writing in a second language is rarely acknowledged as the substantial effort it is. An English-only system does not merely inconvenience non-English speakers; it narrows what the global scholarly record contains and who it serves.
The Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism
The most prominent collective response is the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication, a statement of principles supported by research organisations, learned societies and infrastructures across many countries. Its central arguments are straightforward and powerful. It calls for support for the dissemination of research in a variety of languages, recognising that communicating findings to society often requires the local language. It calls for protecting national infrastructures for publishing locally relevant research, so that journals and platforms serving particular language communities are not allowed to wither. And it insists that research-assessment systems should not disadvantage research published in languages other than English, challenging the metrics and habits that equate quality with English-language publication. The initiative reframes multilingualism not as a problem to be tidied away but as a value to be defended — essential both to the global circulation of knowledge and to the relationship between research and the societies that fund and need it.
Infrastructures for multilingual scholarship
Principles need infrastructure to become practice, and a key example is OPERAS, the European research infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities. These are disciplines where language matters acutely — where the object of study is frequently bound to a particular culture and language, and where the monograph and the locally published journal remain central. OPERAS works to coordinate and strengthen the services, platforms and standards that support open, multilingual scholarship in these fields, helping ensure that work in many languages can be published, discovered and sustained rather than squeezed out. Infrastructures of this kind matter because multilingualism cannot survive on goodwill alone; it requires platforms that publish in many languages, discovery systems that surface them, and standards that let them interoperate.
Practical measures: abstracts, translation and metadata
Alongside the large initiatives, a set of concrete practices can make the scholarly record more genuinely multilingual:
- Multilingual abstracts. Providing abstracts in more than one language — for instance, an English abstract for a paper written in another language, or vice versa — lets readers across language boundaries discover and assess work they would otherwise miss.
- Translation and translated outputs. Supporting translation makes important work available to new audiences, and treating a translation as a genuine output acknowledges the skilled work it involves.
- Language metadata. Recording the language of an output consistently in its metadata is a small step with large effects, because it lets discovery systems handle multilingual content properly rather than defaulting to English.
- Multilingual peer review and editorial capacity. Sustaining the ability to review and edit in many languages is part of keeping non-English scholarship viable.
Bibliodiversity
Underlying all of this is the concept of bibliodiversity: the idea that a healthy scholarly ecosystem, like a healthy natural one, depends on diversity — of languages, of publishing models, of formats, of venues, of the communities that produce and own scholarship. A monoculture is fragile and narrow; it serves the powerful and erases the rest. Bibliodiversity treats the plurality of languages in scholarship not as untidiness to be standardised away but as a strength to be cultivated. It reframes the goal: not a single global language for research, but a scholarly record rich enough to hold the many languages in which knowledge is actually made and used.
A consistent vocabulary across languages
Making the scholarly record multilingual paradoxically requires shared structures beneath the surface. For outputs in many languages to be described, discovered and credited consistently, the metadata about them — language, output type, contributor roles, relationships — must mean the same thing everywhere. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides: a shared vocabulary so that information about multilingual outputs is understood identically wherever it travels. And because contribution is contribution in any language, the work behind multilingual scholarship can be described in the same framework as any other — the CRediT taxonomy — while the broader questions of fair attribution are taken up in our work on authorship. Language equity is, in the end, about who gets to take part in the global conversation of research; a multilingual record is one that lets far more of the world speak and be heard.