Whilst not wanting to get into the debate on exclusion/inclusion
etc., I do wonder what a monolingual research project is. If several
research teams conduct social science research in a number of
different EU countries, I would presume that the act of research will
be conducted in their respective languages. They may choose to
communicate with each other and exchange results in one language, but
this does not mean that they can't all speak more than one language.
A further complication is that the European Commission wants to
administer the project and evaluate the results, and administrators
and evaluators therefore need to be able to read the outputs. There
is nothing to prevent each team in a project publishing their own or
collective results in their own languages, but the practicalities of
all members of a group being able to understand what is happening
suggests a common language.
Indeed I would suggest further that as the EU is keen for projects to
be successful in research terms the use of a common language for
communication between partners could be considered 'best practice'. I
am sure this might provoke a furious response from some, but I invite
them to reply in whatever language they choose. I presume they will
use English if they want to be understood by the majority. I would
never claim that this was right, but that is how things are, and path
dependence means it will be incredibly difficult to change.
David Charles
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Dr David R. Charles
Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies
University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK
tel +44 191 222 7692
fax +44 191 232 9259
www http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~ncurds/
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