Linguistic distance to English impedes research performance

Today, scientific knowledge is predominantly disseminated in English. We show that global universities’ research performance, as measured by publications in top journals, declines as the differences between their local language and English increase. This effect is robust to controls for university factors like proportion of international staff and faculty-to-student ratio, as well as country-level factors like economic development, youth academic achievement, university degree rate, politics, culture, trade with and geographic distance to English speaking countries, among others. This quantification of the research performance penalties induced by linguistic distance from the lingua franca may inform policy makers who must balance trade-offs between embracing English against cultural and local labor market pressures to orient around the local language.