20 years in English as a medium of instruction: an unstoppable train?

In egalitarian, welfare-state Denmark, it felt oddly out of place, and in intellectual circles, it was met with a degree of ridicule and mockery. Around the same time, people in Denmark began to worry that English was spreading through their universities so fast that one day, it would no longer be possible to talk about science at all in Danish.

It took me almost twenty years, and the UKRI-funded ELEMENTAL research project, to show how those two things were connected. ELEMENTAL stands for English as the Language of Education Mechanisms in Europe: New Transdisciplinary Approaches in Linguistics and its core objective was to understand the drivers behind English as a medium of instruction in European higher education.

The usual story.

The most common explanation for why so many European universities now teach academic subjects through English is internationalisation and the Bologna Declaration. In 1999, European ministers agreed to make their degrees comparable so that students could move freely between countries, and English became the obvious common language. Twenty years ago, as OpenLearn was launching, this process was in full swing. In the last decade alone, the number of English-taught programmes in Europe has roughly tripled (Wingrove et al., 2025).

That story is not wrong, but it is incomplete. It doesn’t ask why internationalisation suddenly became so important, or why Europe needed to create a European Higher Education Area to compete with the rest of the world. It simply treats these political decisions as unquestioned necessities.

The story behind the story.

Our research traced English-taught teaching further back, to the late 1970s and 1980s (Hultgren et al., in press). That is when European governments, following Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s America, began running public universities more like businesses, an approach known as New Public Management. Universities were given “autonomy”, but with strings attached: targets, performance indicators, funding formulas and league tables.

In the Netherlands, one university had been set a target of 6,000 students by parliament. Unable to reach this target with Dutch students alone, it launched a programme originally taught in four languages – Dutch, French, German and English - to attract students from Germany and Belgium. Before long, the programme was taught only in English as it proved too administratively complex to maintain four languages. Nobody had set out to make English the language of Dutch higher education. It was a practical way to meet a state-imposed target.

This pattern repeated across Europe: the more “autonomy” governments gave universities, and the more targets they had to meet to secure funding, the more English-taught programmes appeared. Even the politicians who designed these reforms often avoided calling them what they were. As one former Dutch education minister told us:

“I call it not New Public Management because I dislike everything which smells like neoliberalism.”

The longer shadow.

Go back further still and the story becomes uncomfortable. For centuries, European powers, including Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Germany, exported their languages, universities and ideas of what counts as knowledge to the lands they colonised. That history gave Europe a head start in the global knowledge economy that it still enjoys. As the US rose to become a global superpower after the Second World War, English took over the role that other European languages had once played – slowly at first, then at an accelerating pace from the 1980s.

Colonialism was justified as a “civilising mission”, resting on a belief that European ways of life and knowledge were superior. Today, the terminology is different – quality, excellence, international standards – but the effect can be similar. European and Anglophone ways of assuring quality, doing research and producing knowledge are treated as the benchmark everyone else must meet, and universities in the Global South can play by these rules or risk being left out altogether.

Europe is not just a place where English as a language of instruction has spread; it is one of the main places spreading it. Outside the “Big Four” – the US, UK, Australia and Canada – more English-taught degree programmes are offered in Europe than in any other region, accounting for over 40% of them (British Council & Studyportals, 2024a, b). The rankings, quality standards and funding models Europe and Anglophone countries helped create are copied by universities around the world, often at the expense of their own languages. In Nepal, for example, a country with more than a hundred languages, Nepali could serve as a shared language of study. Increasingly, English does instead.

Why this matters.

None of this means English is bad. A shared language lets people study, work and think together across borders, and I have benefited from that myself. But when English arrives as part of a market model of education, it brings more than words. It carries assumptions about what a university is for, whose knowledge counts and which ways of thinking are “international”. Other traditions of knowledge, written and spoken in other languages, are pushed to the margins.

As British and European academics, we are not bystanders. Our universities, our governments and, yes, our own teaching and publishing help keep the system going. That gives us a responsibility to ask whether it is the system we want.

The next twenty years.

What might we see by OpenLearn’s 40th birthday? Some countries, including the Netherlands and Denmark, are already trying to limit English-taught teaching. But real change, if we want it, is not simply about switching back to national languages, which bring their own inequalities for minoritised speakers and along lines of class. A growing number of scholars are beginning to imagine what a truly different university – more democratic and more equal – might look like, and how to bring it about.

The rise of English is often described as natural and inevitable - as an unstoppable train. It wasn’t. It was the result of political choices. And choices, unlike natural forces, can be made differently.

Find out more: Hultgren, A. K., Zuaro, B., Wingrove, P. and Yuksel, D. (in press) New Public Management and English as a Medium of Instruction. Cambridge University Press.