Multilingualism research in Anglophone contexts as a discursive construction of multilingual practice

This article investigates the presence of multilingualism as an academic practice within the field of research in multilingualism by examining the citation practices of research publishing in key English-language journals in the field. It investigates how researchers make use of material published in other languages as a component of their research writing and thus of their conceptualisation of the field of research to determine to what extent multilingualism itself is actually present in multilingual research communicated in English. This article argues that, although some research published in languages other than English may be cited in multilingualism research, multilingualism as a visible research practice is largely absent from the study of multilingualism. This means that research into multilingualism largely constructs multilingualism as a subject to be studied from a perspective that lies outside the phenomenon of multilingualism itself and normalises monolingualism as the standard form of academic practice within the English-speaking world. It can therefore be argued that multilingualism research is a site in which a monolingual habitus predominates and that this represents an epistemological dilemma for the field.