At the most recent Eastern APA (American Philosophical Association) meeting, there was a session on the Barcelona Principles, which argues that non-native English speakers are at a disadvantage in “analytic” or “Anglo-American” philosophy.
The authors of the principles argue that this is because of the emphasis on “linguistic appearances” in evaluating journal submissions and the lack of non-native English speakers on editorial boards or any special policies for submissions from such speakers. They propose several principles for philosophers to “endorse, promote and apply,” the first of which is:
- To evaluate, as a rule, publications, presentations, proposals and submissions without giving undue weight to their authors’ linguistic style, fluency or accent.
I think this is an excellent suggestion, though it is admittedly difficult to implement. Analytic philosophy emphasizes precision and clarity in ways that mean reviewers attend carefully to how arguments are stated and authors’ word choice. What counts as “undue” is going to be contentious.
I’d add to the principles that it isn’t just “non-native English speakers” who have this disadvantage: so do speakers of “World” or “Global” Englishes, who have English as a mother tongue but don’t speak it the way it is spoken in the United States or UK (or Australasia). This includes many former colonies of the US or UK, where there are also different English registers or sociolects.
As for how to navigate the first principle, I have a few thoughts about what referees can do:
- Don’t copyedit. If the reviewer identifies issues with linguistic style or grammar, rather than giving in to the temptation to act as a copyeditor and list the errors, which makes them salient, identify one or two types and indicate that the author may wish to have the paper reviewed by a professional for these issues.
- Check your instincts. Given Muphry’s Law (yes, that’s spelled right), it’s likely that your own referee report will include errors. Sometimes reviewers are strident about what they take to be grammatical rules that are merely stylistic norms (like not ending a sentence with a preposition or not splitting infinitives).
- Restrict comments to what’s written. Resist the temptation to draw inferences about the author’s philosophical knowledge or about what language(s) they speak. State explicitly what about, e.g., word choice is a problem, but do not include qualifiers such as, “The author is unaware that…” or “The author fails to understand…” (I think this is a good general principle, in any case.)