ABSTRACT
While global academia continues to increasingly embrace English as the preferred language of publication, official national policies in Iran emphasize the promotion of Farsi as the language of academic publications. However, university regulations appear to practically foster the trend of publishing in English, mainly through mechanisms of academic promotion that tend to allocate higher scores to English language publications. To inquire into this issue in the Iranian academic landscape, in the current study we are building on a consideration of several related policy documents. We explore the views of 125 faculty members of a major Iranian university, both through a questionnaire-based survey and through interviews. While the participants show clear inclination towards publishing in English, they also express concerns for the status of the national language vis-à-vis the mainstream global academic publishing trends. On this basis, we discuss some implications of such mixed sentiments for local academic policies and practices, as well as for the wider non-Anglophone academia.
