[whatshisface]

The rising proportion of non-native speakers in US academia is what I thought of when I saw the article's claim that academic vocabulary is shrinking over time. Papers written by adult language learners tend to cluster around domain terminology + the absolute most common English words + words that happen to be similar to ones from their native language, and there's not a lot of incentive for them to go read Charles Dickens until they're indistinguishable from native speakers because, really, it doesn't matter and nobody cares.

[avs733]

Add in “grant writing specialists” with no domain expertise but lots of “test the nsf as an api” expertise and you have even bigger sources of error in these claims.