Pour que les langues nationales aient un futur dans les sciences

This chapter presents the theoretical foundations and guidelines for implementing a project concerning scientific publishing, which is increasingly a field of competition — more than cooperation — among academic languages and cultures, permeated and heavily conditioned by diverse interests, including (if not primarily) economic ones. The growing hegemony of English — cleverly presented as a “neutral” language of science (implicit in and reinforced by the consolidated formula “international lingua franca”) — in many fields, together with an aggressive, sometimes predatory, policy in scientific publishing, indeed constitutes a cultural hegemony that generates inequalities and particularly negative feedback: loss of functionalities of other scientific languages; planned or involuntary obsolescence of non‑English bibliographies; consequent corruption of the principle of cumulative science; ossification of scientific discourse through the loss of diversity in epistemological models; loss of robustness and drift toward conformity in academic writing (a trend likely to be reinforced by the progressive normalization of generative AI tools); dismantling of research and editorial networks; impact on the mobility and careers of teacher‑researchers; symbolic and argumentative domination; etc. In the face of this avalanche of negative, even crippling, consequences, it is necessary to build a plea and a readily operational project in order, respectively, to denounce and to counterbalance this trend by means of adapted and ambitious strategies. Very concretely, we propose the guidelines for a Label for high‑quality scientific publishing in French and multilingual work, certifying that scientific journals adopt a charter of good practices both at the level of maintaining linguistic diversity in publishing and at the level of the expertise and procedures for selecting and improving contributions. Three interconnected sub‑objectives: (1) to motivate francophone researchers and those from other linguistic communities to publish more massively in the French language and more generally in their native languages — in all disciplines — or at least to yield less often to injunctions to publish in English; (2) to award qualitative criteria and limit quantitative criteria in the evaluation of scientific output, which moreover must gain in transparency; (3) to encourage multilingualism (or plurilingualism) in the development and dissemination of scientific work, which is not only a matter of equity but also of creativity and epistemological diversity, thus of innovation potential.