This study aims to contribute to the ongoing scholarly debate about linguistic privilege in academia. The article pushes this debate forward by considering the role of English in the career development of academics in Anglophone universities. More concretely, our study empirically explores the career trajectories of multilingual scholars in Ireland who speak English as an additional language (EAL). Adopting a Bourdieusian lens, the article conceptualises academia as a locus of competitive struggle over authority, recognition, and prestige, in which scholars avail themselves of different kinds of capital, including linguistic capital, and deploy strategies to flourish. Through a qualitative approach, the article examines data from university documents and procedures, from interviews with EAL scholars in different disciplines and at different stages of their career, and from interviews with academics holding senior management positions in three universities in Dublin. We analyse the language-related challenges that EAL scholars encounter and the affordances with which Anglophone universities provide them, as well as the ways in which language impacts on their career progression. The empirical data reveals a complex and nuanced interplay between language and other academic factors. Our findings suggest the need to go beyond simple hierarchies of academic privilege or disadvantage based on a scholar’s first or additional language alone.

本研究旨在为学术界正在进行的关于语言特权的学术辩论做出贡献。本文通过考虑英语在英语大学学者职业发展中的作用，推动了这场辩论。更具体地说，我们的研究实证探索了爱尔兰以英语作为附加语言（EAL）的多语言学者的职业轨迹。本文采用布迪厄的视角，将学术界概念化为争夺权威、认可和声望的竞争场所，学者们利用包括语言资本在内的不同类型的资本，并部署发展战略。本文通过定性方法，研究了来自大学文件和程序、对不同学科和职业生涯不同阶段的 EAL 学者的访谈，以及对都柏林三所大学担任高级管理职位的学者的访谈中的数据。我们分析了 EAL 学者遇到的与语言相关的挑战、英语大学为他们提供的能力，以及语言对其职业发展的影响方式。实证数据揭示了语言与其他学术因素之间复杂而微妙的相互作用。我们的研究结果表明，有必要超越仅基于学者的第一语言或其他语言的学术特权或劣势的简单等级制度。