Linguistic hybridity in scientific production: a case study in a research centre at the University of Algarve

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating linguistic hybridity in research in Higher Education. With the increase of mobility in Higher Education, research is becoming more and more multilingual. In fact, it has become quite common for a researcher to have done a multilingual course of studies and a multilingual university career. The scientific production becomes, then, hybrid, shaped by different kind of learning, learnt in different contexts and in different languages. Furthermore, the more and more widespread use of English as the language medium of the global scientific production leads to a kind of multilingualism, in which English holds in most of the case a hegemonic role in comparison with the local language. Therefore, this paper presents a case study leaded at the Universidade do Algarve, in Portugal, and it focuses on the CIMA – Centro de Investigação Marinha e Ambiental, an international research centre where researchers come from different linguistic and academic backgrounds. Through the submission of a questionnaire given to the researches and through individual interviews, this study tries to analyse how multilingualism is reflected in the scientific production and to debate whether this scientific production can be conceived as a form of hybridity, identifying which are the effects of the dominance of English on research.