At a time when English has emerged as the dominant language of academic communication, there is a disturbing silence about the risks and problems attendant on this development and a failure to ask critical questions about its consequences. Who gains and who loses? What is lost in translation? What are the consequences of one way linguistic traffic? I argue that the growing dominance of English has great potential to increase inequality, reduce diversity and enhance certain power relations, and ask what is to be done, offering some proposals as a contribution to a wider and urgently needed debate.