The Increasing Role of English in Thai Academic Publications

Kittinata Rhekhalilit, Siriporn Lerdpaisalwong
2019 MANUSYA  
The role of English as a medium of communication especially in the academic domain has been accelerated. This is reflected in the growing number of English language academic journals in non-English dominant countries such as: China, India and Spain (Ren and Rousseau 2004; Xian 2006). Similar to other peripheral countries, Thailand is no exception. This situation results in competition between the national language and English. This present study compares the language choice of academic papers
more » ... blished in Thai national journals in two major fields: science, and its counterpart, humanities and social science. The data collection includes a corpus of 663 articles published in 2005 and in 2015, specifically 346 from Science and 317 from Humanities and Social science. We have hypothesized that English plays a more significant role in scientific journals compared to those in Humanities and Social science. In addition to the language choice in Thai academic journals, a questionnaire was also distributed to 73 respondents to investigate the language ideology of Thai scholars in choosing a language for their manuscripts. The result reveals that many Thai scholars choose English in writing manuscripts due to the lack of technical terms in their field in Thai whereas some of them prefer Thai due to the publication process and the Thai readership orientation.
doi:10.1163/26659077-02203004 fatcat:vctaiizys5buvmbajl4n4lgrg4