Who am I/who are we in academic writing?L

One of the conspicuous differences infacademic discourse presentation is the preference for use of the first person singular ‘I’ perspective in some languages versus the first person plural ‘we’ perspective in others. This distinction is due not so much to purely linguistic reasons as to cultural ones. The purpose of this paper is to present some data concerning the employment of the two perspectives in English, German, French, Russian and Bulgarian research articles in linguistics and to suggest some explanations, as well as to point to certain cross‐cultural misunderstandings which may result from the differences established here. An attempt is also made to investigate certain cross‐linguistic and cross‐cultural influences among the five languages. The analysis is based on 5 corpora consisting of 300 pages for each language.