Language and the Anglo-European hegemony that dominates academic knowledge infrastructures constitute in many regions of the world one of the primary obstacles to the transmission and exchange of knowledge across and beyond academia, undermining the principles of openness promoted by funders and universities. For as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o writes, research infrastructures continue to perpetuate the colonial tradition of gathering knowledge to be stored away “in a European language for consumption by those who have access to it” (2025: 70). Globalisation and the capitalist logics of academic publishing have intensified the dominance of English in particular, with even users of major European languages under increasing pressure to conform to the Anglophone hegemony of academia in the 21st century (Schnell 2024). In addition to creating structural barriers to academic publishing for those outside the Anglophone world, these tendencies further isolate the outputs of “locally relevant research” (Helsinki Initiative 2019) from their immediate publics and communities and reinforce the marginalisation of knowledges expressed in different languages.

Nevertheless, particularly in the field of Digital Humanities, recent years have seen the emergence across the world of more experimental forms of digital publishing that seek to disrupt the monolingual logics of academic knowledge infrastructures by exploring the potential of digital platforms for fostering more multilingual publishing workflows. This paper is based on a survey of these distinct initiatives, in addition to a selection of more in-depth case studies that combine qualitative analysis of the multilingual affordances and associated language ideologies of specific platforms with semi-structured interviews with their editors and publishers. In addition to reflecting on current publishing practices, these interviews further explore the new challenges associated with the rapid growth of language technologies and AI tools, and the risks and opportunities these bring for furthering multilingual knowledge production and dissemination.

Based on the findings of this research, the paper will summarise the ways authors, editors and publishers can learn from these initiatives in order to contribute to the development of multilingual knowledge infrastructures through their own publishing practices. Building on Digital Humanities’ emphasis on collaborative action to transform academic and digital infrastructures, the paper will highlight the DH community’s potential to lead in experimenting with new multilingual digital publishing models that have the potential to be adopted by wider research communities. The paper will further illustrate the importance of shifting academic priorities away from the (over)production of research outputs from the Anglophone Global North (Klein 2024) to prioritising instead collective efforts to support more equitable models of knowledge dissemination across languages and communities within and beyond academia.