Science once communicated in a polyglot of

tongues, but now English rules alone. How

did this happen and at what cost?

If you can read this sentence, you can talk with a scientist. Well,
maybe not about the details of her research, but at least you would
share a common language. The overwhelming majority of
communication in the natural sciences today physics, chemistry,
biology, geology takes place in English; in print and at
conferences, in emails and in Skype-mediated collaborations,
confirmable by wandering through the halls of any scientific
research facility in Kuala Lumpur or Montevideo or Haifa.
Contemporary science is Anglophone.

More significantly, contemporary science is monoglot: everyone

uses English almost to the exclusion of other languages. A century
ago, the majority of researchers in Western science knew at least
some English, but they also read, wrote and spoke in French and

German, and sometimes in other minor languages, such as the

newly emergent Russian or the rapidly fading Italian.

The past polyglot character of modern science might seem

surprising. Surely it is more efficient to have one language? How
much time would be lost learning to read and write three languages
in order to synthesise benzene derivatives! If everyone uses the
same language, there is less friction caused by translation such as
priority disputes over who discovered what first when the results
appear in different tongues and less waste in pedagogy. By this
view, contemporary science advances at such a staggering rate
precisely because we have focused on the science and not on
superficialities such as language.

This point is much easier to sustain if the speaker grew up speaking

English, but the majority of scientists working today are actually not
native English speakers. When you consider the time spent by them
on language-learning, the English-language conquest is not more
efficient than polyglot science it is just differently inefficient.
Theres still a lot of language-learning and translation going on, its
just not happening in the United Kingdom, or Australia, or the United
States. The bump under the rug has been moved, not smoothed out.

Yet todays scientists are utterly surrounded by Anglophonia, and

the rapid churn and ferment of scientific research shortens
disciplinary memories. Wasnt science always this way? No, it was
not, but only much older scientists recall how it used to be. Often,
scientists or humanists assume that English science replaced
monoglot German, preceded by French and then by Latin in a ribbon
that unfurls back to the dawn of Western science, which they

understand to have been conducted in monoglot Greek.

Understanding the history of science as a chain of monolingual
transfers has a certain superficial appeal, but it isnt true. Never
was.

To paint with a very broad brush, we can observe two basic

linguistic regimes in Western science: the polyglot and the
monoglot. The latter is quite new, emerging just in the 1920s and
vanquishing the centuries-old multilingual regime only in the 1970s.
Science speaks English, but the first generation who grew up within
that monoglot system are still alive. To understand how this
important change happened, we need to start way back.

In the 15th century in Western Europe, natural philosophy and

natural history the two domains of learning that would, by the 19th
century, come to be known as science were both fundamentally
polyglot enterprises. This is the case despite the fact that the
language of learning in the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance
was Latin.
This unusual status of Latin does not contradict the polyglot system;
on the contrary, it confirms it. As any good Renaissance humanist or
scholastic of the Late Middle Ages knew, natural philosophy in Latin
enjoyed a history going back to the glory days of Rome. (Cicero and
Seneca both wrote significant works in the field.) But those same
humanists and scholastics also knew that the dominant language of
scholarship in antiquity down to the final sack of Rome was not Latin
but Hellenistic Greek. They knew that, in the centuries before them,
more natural philosophy was done in Arabic than in either classical
language. The translation of works in canonical natural philosophy

from Arabic into Latin helped birth the revival of learning in the
West. Learning, learned people knew, was a multilingual enterprise.

Latin became a fitting vehicle for claims about universal nature. But
everyone in this conversation was polyglot

So was life. Aside from the rare oddball with overzealous parents
(Montaigne claimed to be one), no one learned Latin as a first
language and few used it orally. Latin was for written scholarship,
but everyone who used it such as Erasmus of Rotterdam
deployed it alongside other languages that they used to
communicate with servants, family members and patrons. Latin was
a vehicular language, used to bridge linguistic communities, and it
was understood as more or less neutral. It excluded on class lines,
to be sure, since it demanded more education, but it crossed
confessional and political divides easily: Protestants used it
frequently (often more elegantly than Catholics), and it was even
imported as late as the 18th century into Orthodox Russia as the
scholarly language of the newly established St Petersburg Academy
of Sciences.

Perhaps most importantly, since Latin was no specific nations

native tongue, and scholars all across European and Arabic societies
could make equal use of it, no one owned the language. For these
reasons, Latin became a fitting vehicle for claims about universal
nature. But everyone in this conversation was polyglot, choosing the
language to suit the audience. When writing to international
chemists, Swedes used Latin; when conversing with mining
engineers, they opted for Swedish.

This system started to break down in the 17th century, in the midst
of, and as an essential part of, what was once dubbed the scientific
revolution. Galileo Galilei published his discovery of the moons of
Jupiter in the Latin Sidereus Nuncius of 1610, but his later major
works were in Italian. As he aimed for a more local audience for
patronage and support, he switched languages.
Newtons Principia (1687) appeared in Latin, but his Opticks of 1704
was English (Latin translation 1706).

Across Europe, scholars began to use a mlange of tongues, and

translations into Latin and French flourished to enable
communication. By the end of the 18th century, works in chemistry,
physics, physiology and botany appeared increasingly in English,
French and German, but also in Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish and
other languages. Until the first third of the 19th century, many
learned elites still opted for Latin. (The German mathematician Carl
Friedrich Gauss kept his scholarly notebooks, at least through the
1810s, in the same language Julius Caesar used for his.) Modern
science emerged organically from the polyglot stew of the
Renaissance.

Concerns for efficiency as an often unquestioned good,

accompanying 19th century European industrialisation, began to
change the centuries-old polyglot system. Many languages seemed
wasteful; spend all your time learning languages in order to read the
latest in natural philosophy, and youd never do any research.
Around 1850, the scientific languages began to compress to English,
French and German, each occupying roughly equal proportions of
total production (although each science had a different distribution:

by the end of the century, German was the front-runner in

chemistry).
Modern nationalism swept Europe alongside the flourishing of
industrialisation. Across the continent, poets and intellectuals
cultivated and often heavily modified vernacular languages to be
bearers of 19th century modernity. These guardians of language
faced significant challenges in adapting the spoken tongues of the
peasantry to the demands of high literature and natural science.
The story for the arts is widely known: modern Hungarian, Czech,
Italian, Hebrew, Polish and other literatures blossomed in the second
half of the century. However, the high valuation for efficiency in the
sciences somewhat tamed this incipient Babel, with only Russian
breaking through to become a significant (if much smaller) language
of scientific publication. Partisans of the minor languages
constantly complained of exclusion, while speakers of the big three
grumbled about having to learn the other two.

Three languages was a burden, no question. There were advocates

of only one language for scientific learning, citing precisely the
universality and perceived neutrality Latin had enjoyed in earlier
centuries. They called for Esperanto. They made cogent arguments,
the same arguments you hear for English today. Esperanto even
found a few high-profile converts, such as Wilhelm Ostwald, winner
of the 1909 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Otto Jespersen, the
Danish linguist, but they were soon dismissed as utopian dreamers
even as their enthusiasms shifted to more extreme artificiallanguage projects. It was obvious to everyone that science could not
exist other than as a polyglot endeavour.

Something obviously changed. We now live in the Esperantists

dreamworld, but the universal language of natural science is
English, a language that is the native tongue of some very powerful
nation states and as a consequence not at all neutral. What
happened to the polyglot system of science? It broke. More
accurately, it was broken. When the Great War erupted in summer
1914 between the Central Powers (principally, Germany and AustriaHungary) and the Triple Entente (Britain, France, Russia), among the
first casualties were the ideals of beneficent internationalism.
German scientists joined other intellectuals in extolling Germanys
war aims. French and British scientists took note.

After the war, the International Research Council, formed under the
aegis of the victorious Entente now including the US but excluding
Russia, which had descended into the maelstrom of the Bolshevik
Revolution initiated a boycott of scientists from the Central
Powers. New international institutions for science were erected in
the early 1920s locking out the defeated Germanophone scientists.
This exclusion lit a long-delay fuse that, in the coming decades,
would contribute to the death of German as a leading scientific
language. Three languages had, for part of Europe, diminished to
two. Germans responded to their predicament by reinvigorating
their commitment to their native language. The multilingual system
was beginning to crack, but it was the Americans who would shatter
it.

In the Germanophobic frenzy that followed the entry of the US into

the war in April 1917, German became criminalised. Iowa, Ohio,
Nebraska and others rolled back what was by far the most
commonly spoken language besides English in the US (a
consequence of massive immigration from central Europe). The

proscription of German only grew after Armistice Day. By 1923, more

than half of the states in the Union had restricted the use of German
in public spaces, over the telegraph and telephone lines, and in
childrens education.

That year, the Supreme Court overturned these laws in the

landmark case of Meyer v Nebraska, but the damage was done.
Foreign-language education was devastated, even for French and
Spanish, and a whole generation of Americans, including future
scientists, grew up without much exposure to foreign languages. In
the mid-1920s, when German and Austrian physicists published
about the new quantum mechanics, American physicists were only
able to read the German papers because Yankees still traversed the
Atlantic for graduate study in Weimar Germany, and had necessarily
learned the language.

The gradient of travel soon went the other way. In 1933, Adolf Hitler
summarily fired non-Aryan and Left-leaning professors, devastating
German science. Those Jewish scientists who were lucky enough to
emigrate in the 1930s faced a number of challenges. Cornelius
Lanczos, one of Albert Einsteins former assistants, had difficulty
publishing in English both because of his topic and because of the
well-known excuse of bad language, even though he had
subject[ed] the text to a thorough revision with good friends. Even
Einstein relied on translators and collaborators.

Meanwhile, the German physicist James Franck moved to Chicago

and eventually adapted to English, while Max Born settled in
Edinburgh, deploying the English he had happily learned in younger
days. Many of these figures mentioned their struggle with the new

language, much as Japanese Nobelists do today in their

autobiographies, remarking on the significance of their first
publications in English to establishing their findings and their
reputations beyond the archipelago. But that is to get ahead of
ourselves back in the 1930s, Hitler also shut down most visas for
foreign students. Restricting access to German universities meant
further cutting off the German language, effectively completing the
process begun by the Great War.

As the Cold War progressed, publishing in Russian was also

interpreted as a clear political statement

After the Second World War, the story increasingly becomes one of
demographics and geopolitics. In contrast to the comparatively
plurilingual approach of the sprawling British empire during the 19th
century, scientists from the rising American empire of the 20th were
not expected to acquire competence in foreign languages. The
massive bulk of Soviet scientists and engineers that rose up after
the war, however, presented the US with a new scientific competitor.
In the 1950s and 60s, with about 25 per cent of world publication,
Russian became the second most dominant scientific language,
trailing the 60 per cent of English. But by the 1970s the percentage
of Russian publications began to drop as scientists worldwide blazed
the trail to Anglophonia.

The American inability or refusal to learn Russian, let alone other

foreign languages, in order to conduct their science, combined with
the export of an Americanised science system across the Atlantic to
Anglophone and non-Anglophone countries alike, further propelled

the Anglicisation of science. The willingness of Europeans, Latin

Americans and others to accede to this new monolingual regime
also played a role. Since they wanted to be cited by the leaders of
the field, the Dutch, Scandinavians and Iberians ceased publishing
in French or German and switched to English. Paradoxically,
publishing in anything other than English came to be seen as a
manifestation of nationalist particularism: no one published in
French who was not natively Francophone; mutatis mutandis for
German.

As the Cold War progressed, publishing in Russian was also

interpreted as a clear political statement. Meanwhile, generations of
scientists around the world continued to learn English, but this odd
development in the history of science often did not register as
deeply political. By the early 1980s, English was occupying well over
80 per cent of world publication in the natural sciences. Now it
hovers in the vicinity of 99 per cent.

So what? Maybe the apostles of efficiency have it right, and science

is now better for being communicated in one language the evident
successes of recent science might be interpreted in this light. Yet we
should also appreciate the costs. In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev almost
lost credit for his development of the periodic table because he had
published in Russian not German, and today publishing in a fastpaced field in anything other than English and in anything other
than a leading journal leads to work being ignored.

French mathematicians often proudly publish in French, where the

formalism aids the Anglophones in following the proofs. In heavily
experimental sciences with fewer equations, such a luxury is

unthinkable. How many promising students are shunted out of a

scientific career because they have a hard time with English, and
not with multivariable calculus? The problem becomes more severe
as the worlds textbook production, even for high schools, shifts to
Anglophone: market criteria simply wont sustain Czech or Swahili
microbiology books. Monoglot science comes with a price.

Once established, however, it seems rather stable. It is dangerous to

speculate about the future of scientific languages when the present
is literally unprecedented. Never before has there been such a
monoglot system of scientific communication, let alone one that
reaches every corner of the globe with the default being the native
language of a military and economic juggernaut.

Two things, however, can be stated with confidence. First, it takes a

lot of energy to maintain a monoglot system on such a scale, with
enormous resources poured into language training and translation in
non-Anglophone countries. And, second, if the Anglophone nations
were to vanish tomorrow, English would still be a significant
language of science, simply because of the vast inertia of what
already exists. The anchoring effect whereby scientists build on past
knowledge supports both yesterdays polyglot and todays monoglot
regimes.

Just ask your nearest scientist. Shell understand you.

4 February 2015

Read more essays on cultures & languages, history of science and

philosophy of science

Michael D Gordin is a historian of modern science at Princeton University

in New Jersey. His latest book, Scientific Babel, is due in April 2015.