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• Funding institutions with difficulties to innovate subject and
approaches, unless they’re considered important abroad;
• Brain drain of academic staff usually to Europe and to United States.
This list shows that we were not ready to start working at the level proposed
in terms of basic infrastructure and sometimes human resources. It requires of
us, as a network, a change of culture to work to propose academic South-South
cooperation.
Departing from this picture we made suggestions for new requirements
(institutional and funding formats) for international and cutting edge research
on Multilingualism:
• Invest locally in Junior Researchers;
• Consider research projects on national languages or official languages.
This would be interesting to strengthen partnerships with local
institutions, so they would be forced to get in touch with new research
trends;
• Invest in research network for humanities, sharing libraries and
promotion of professors and researchers exchange;
• Invest in similar pairs evaluation (someone in Angola is much more able
to evaluate the real condition for research production in Mozambique,
than a specialist that doesn’t share the same research conditions).
6. For the Construction of Inclusive Societies
In our region there is a contradiction on the necessary presupposition that there
is a dominant knowledge, expressed in academy, and that we – as scholars –
are in a position to re-inscribe local languages and local cultures without any
support. In contact with the group that works with multilingualism in the 2011
Yakutsk conference and with the UNESCO Information For All Programme
group dedicated to multilingualism I figured out that from the academic
perspective we need to organize the memory of the initiatives already taken,
and to create an observatory of the projects in course.
It is important to give a place in academy for studies on multilingualism in
general and for Multilingualism in Digital World. We should be more flexible
with multiple areas of knowledge to consider Multilingualism studies. It is
possible to work with multilingualism from many angles. But to enable the
construction of inclusive societies within local universities in our region, it is
necessary to have a minimum of good examples, reports of national experiences,
similar to the Russian publication “Preservation of Linguistic Diversity:
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