Structured scholarly dialogue among five sociolinguists examining how GenAI tools influence academic writing practices, reinforce or disrupt linguistic hierarchies, and impact the legitimacy of diverse English varieties in global scholarly communication. Raises concerns about linguistic homogenization and the marginalization of World Englishes.
Key Findings
The article is a structured scholarly dialogue among five sociolinguists from World Englishes and adjacent fields, organized around five guiding questions covering GenAI's broad influence in academic writing and publishing (AWP), its potential biases toward dominant Englishes, institutional responsibilities, peer review practices, and ethical frameworks.Contributors see potential for GenAI to democratise writing processes, while raising concerns that it may homogenise linguistic styles, privilege dominant English varieties, and flatten nuance in scholarly writing.The dialogue foregrounds themes of linguistic (in)justice, researcher agency, and institutional responsibility, with contributors calling for equity-informed policies, critical AI literacy, and inclusive co-design in GenAI development.Drawing on Blommaert's notion of "orders of indexicality," contributors argue that language varieties are evaluated through hierarchies of value, and that GenAI reinforces these hierarchies by automating what counts as 'good' writing — so apparent improvements in quality may conceal the algorithmic enforcement of standardised norms.The authors conclude that while GenAI may reinforce existing hierarchies, it can also serve as a site of resistance, depending on how it is designed, governed, and used within scholarly communities committed to linguistic diversity.Study Design & Method
Rather than an empirical study, the piece is a dialogic scholarly intervention: five contributors with expertise in World Englishes and adjacent fields respond to five guiding questions, with the article structured around their exchanges. The authors contrast this approach with recent interview-based work (Moorhouse et al., 2025) that reports policy ambiguity among applied-linguistics journal editors, who largely restricted acceptable GenAI use to language polishing while treating transparency as essential.
Implications for AI in Education
For Writing Education and English for Research Publication Purposes, the dialogue implies that GenAI tools are not linguistically neutral: they encode standards that can marginalise minoritised varieties, so questions of Equity must be built into how academic writing instruction prepares students to use these tools. The calls for critical AI Literacy and inclusive co-design connect directly to curricula, suggesting students should be taught to use GenAI reflexively rather than defer to its standardising output.
Connected Concepts
Language LearningAI LiteracyWriting EducationEquityAutomated Essay ScoringStudent ExperienceEquity In AI EducationTeacher AI CompetencyConnected Articles
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Kingsley Ugwuanyi, Christian Mair, Sender Dovchin, Iker Erdocia, Maria Kuteeva (2026). Generative AI and linguistic diversity in academic writing and publishing: Perspectives from World Englishes. arXiv:2607.28505. cs.CL.