As a result of the increasingly strict standards for recognizing researchers' work and the importance of publications and citations for scientific prestige, English has become the lingua franca for academic dissemination (López-Navarro et al., 2015). As a consequence, other languages, especially minority languages, have been neglected in the scientific community (Linkov et al., 2021). One of these languages is Basque, a language spoken in the Basque Country in an area covering the north of Spain and the south of France with approximately 750,000 speakers. In the last decade, the presence of Basque in university education has increased, as has the number of scientific publications in this language (Boillos & Bereziartua, 2020). Therefore, it is of interest to know researchers' beliefs and attitudes about prioritizing the publication of scientific papers in a minority language and not in the lingua franca of the scientific field. In order to delve deeper into these beliefs, we have analyzed the reasons why 302 Basque researchers in the area of Social Sciences and Humanities from 3 different universities do publish their work in Basque language. The analysis of these reflections has been carried out through the Reintert method using the Iramuteq software (Reinert, 1990). Specifically, the software identifies the words and text segments with the highest Chi-square values, that is, those words and text segments that best identify each class or idea that the participants have repeatedly mentioned. This lexical analysis was complemented with a lexical similarity analysis. The results show that researchers are concerned about the survival of this language as a minority language. The reasons why they publish in Basque go beyond academic reasons, and strengthening the curriculum is not the priority when publishing in this language. Ideological positioning also plays an important role. These results lead us to reflect on the importance of promoting academic recognition of publications in languages other than English.
Boillos, M. M., & Bereziartua, G. (2020). Basque in the scientific field: quantitative study of the abstract of the Humanities and Social Sciences journals (2010-2019). Fontes Linguae Vasconum, (129), 141-177. https://doi.org/10.35462/FLV129.5
Linkov, V., O'Doherty, K., Choi, E., & Han, G. (2021). Linguistic Diversity Index: A Scientometric Measure to Enhance the Relevance of Small and Minority Group Languages. SAGE Open, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440211009191
López-Navarro, I., Moreno, A.I., Quintanilla, M.Á. et al. (2015). Why do I publish research articles in English instead of my own language? Differences in Spanish researchers' motivations across scientific domains. Scientometrics 103, 939–976. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1570-1
Reinert, M. (1990). Alceste, Une méthode d'analyse des données textuelles. Application au texte "Aurélia" de Gérard de Nerval [Alceste, a method for analyzing textual data. Applying to the text "Aurelia" of Gérard de Nerval]. Bull. Methodol. Sociol. 26, 25–54. doi: 10.1177/07591063900260010
