English remains the lingua franca of scholarly publications, but other languages are gaining ground

By Martin LaSalle Apr 14th, 2026

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In 5 seconds Drawing on 88 million articles across all disciplines, an UdeM study examines the global evolution of language use in academic publishing between 1990 and 2023.

The number of articles in English increased more than fivefold between 1990 and 2023, rising from approximately 877,000 to nearly 5,000,000. It is the relative share of English that has declined as other scientific communities have gradually begun publishing more in their own languages.
Photo : Getty

In 2023, about 85 per cent of the roughly five million articles indexed in major global databases covering the natural, medical and social sciences were written in English. In 1990, the proportion was considerably higher: 94 per cent.

The nine percentage-point increase in the use of other languages over the past 30 years represents a modest but significant shift in the landscape of scholarly communication, and a step toward greater equity, diversity and inclusion in global knowledge production.

That's what Université de Montréal PhD student Carolina Pradier and postdoctoral fellow Lucía Céspedes reveal in a new study directed by Vincent Larivière, a professor in UdeM's School of Library and Information Science.

Published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, the study is a probing look into the many languages used in nearly 88 million articles and conference proceedings, as well as approximately 1.48 billion references cited in them, since 1990.

Cited works almost all in English

While the relative prevalence of English in scholarly publications has eroded over the years, with researchers gradually publishing more in other languages, the overall volume of articles published in English has not declined at all — quite the contrary.

Indeed, English-language articles have more than quintupled, from about 877,000 in 1990 to nearly 5 million in 2023, the co-authors note in their study.

The dominance of English is especially evident in the analysis of citations. “While publications in English account for 85 per cent of the analyzed corpus, 98.89 per cent of the references cited were in English,” said Pradier.

Even in the countries that publish the least in English—Indonesia, Brazil, Ecuador and Angola –English-language references accounted for at least 92 per cent of all references cited.

“On the one hand, there is the language in which researchers write their articles, and on the other there are the studies they rely on to advance their research,” explained Pradier. “Non-English-speaking researchers can now produce work in their own language, but they must still engage with literature that is overwhelmingly written in English.”

Carolina Pradier
Photo : provided by Carolina Pradier

The rise of Indonesian

The authors highlight the case of Indonesian. Virtually absent from citation databases in the early 1990s, it is now used in 2.69 per cent of global scholarly publications, surpassing French and German.

According to Pradier, this breakthrough is no accident.

“In 2014, the Indonesian government issued a decree requiring that all scholarly publications be made freely accessible online, which led to the widespread adoption of Open Journal Systems, an open-source, free-to-use journal publishing platform,” she said.

According to Pradier, this is a good example of how national policies on linguistic diversity can change the publishing landscape.

“The rise of publications in Indonesian essentially started from scratch,” she said. “By contrast, Spanish- and Portuguese-language publications in Latin America grew thanks to existing platforms such as Latindex, SciELO and Redalyc, which allowed the region to build a largely self-sufficient ecosystem for knowledge dissemination.”

French in freefall

In contrast to the rising share of publications in Indonesian, Spanish and Portuguese, the use of French has fallen sharply. Once the second most common language, with a 2.14 per cent share of indexed articles in 1990, French slumped to 1.06 per cent by 2023, well behind these three languages.

German has also declined, slipping from 1.38 per cent to 1.23 per cent over the same period.

Pradier attributes these changes to structural factors, noting that the main francophone research communities—France and Quebec—are well integrated into dominant publishing networks. This gives researchers the resources to publish in English and access English-language publications.

By contrast, more peripheral countries, less exposed to pressures to publish in high-profile journals, are developing more independent networks.

“Evaluation policies have a decisive influence,” explained Pradier. “In Quebec, the focus on publishing in high-impact journals encourages publishing in English, whereas in Latin America, greater value is placed on publishing in the national language.”

One exception to the dominance of English is French-language journals in the humanities and social sciences, where fewer than half the citations are to English-language sources. Pradier attributes this “pocket of resistance” to the localized nature of the research topics and the strength of francophone networks in these disciplines.

Blind spots in knowledge

Beyond the numbers, the study highlights the negative consequences of English dominance.

For example, researchers whose working language is not English face tangible costs, including more time devoted to writing, higher rejection rates and stress. This can lead to what the study’s authors call a “survivorship bias,” where only those with sufficient English proficiency succeed in establishing an international research career.

More broadly, English dominance harms knowledge production. “It leads to an epistemic loss as entire swaths of global knowledge production written in undervalued languages remain invisible to the international community,” Pradier said. “Publishing exclusively in English creates enduring blind spots.”

The researchers have two recommendations for policymakers: implement open-source, no-cost accessible journal publishing platforms, and reform current evaluation systems to make them less dependent on citation counts.

“If we focus just on number of citations, we'll continue to encourage the use of English,” Pradier concluded. “Evaluation should also take into account quality and local relevance.”

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