Spanish in Science and Higher Education: Perspectives for a Plurilingual Language Policy in the Spanish-speaking World

Language planning for international scientific communication needs to be understood in the context of some general language policy for the larger field of science and higher education. The academic field is a sociological and sociolinguistic field of production and circulation of science. This field contains monolingual and bi- or multilingual activities and subfields. Careful policy-decisions and language planning activities are needed to organise the coexistence of different languages in shared territories from a plurilingual enrichment perspective. This paper sketches elements of a heuristic language policy for the academic field in the Spanish language community that is taken as a collective actor, stakeholder and addressee.