Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Linguistic unification of the same order of magnitude has taken place in the last fifty years in most branches of science. Many languages have served at different times as vehicles of scientific advance: Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Syriac, Latin, and Arabic from ancient times to the Middle Ages; then Italian and French in the European Renaissance and early modern period. In the eighteenth century, the advances made by Linnaeus in the description and classification of botanical species, as well as Berzelius’s research in chemistry, made Swedish a language of science, and for about a hundred years it kept a respected place. English and French continued to be used for numerous disciplines, but German burst onto the scene in the nineteenth century with the new chemistry invented by Liebig and others; and Dmitri Mendeleyev, who created the periodic table of elements, helped to put Russian among the international languages of science before the end of the nineteenth century. Between 1900 and 1940, new scientific research continued to be published, often in intense rivalry, in Russian, French, German, and English (Swedish having dropped off the map by then). But the Nazis’ abuse of science between 1933 and 1945 discredited the language they used. German began to lose its status as a world science language with the fall of Berlin in 1945—and many leading German scientists were of course whisked off to America and Britain in short order and functioned thereafter as English speakers. French entered a slow decline, and Russian, which expanded in use after the Second World War and continued to be cultivated for political reasons during the remaining years of the U.S.S.R., dropped out of the science scene in 1989. So we are left with English. English is the language of science worldwide; learned journals published in Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, Berlin, and Paris are now either entirely in English or else carry English translations alongside foreign-language texts. Academic advancement everywhere is dependent on publication in English. Indeed, in Israel it is said that God himself would not get promotion in any science department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Why not? Because he has only one publication—and it was not written in English. (I do not really believe this story. The fact that the publication in question has been translated into English and is even available in paperback would surely overrule the promotion committee’s misgivings.)

Despite this, efforts are being made to allow some languages to serve once again as local science dialects. A U.S.-government-sponsored Web service, for example, WorldWideScience.org, now offers searches of non-English-language databases in China, Russia, France, and some South American countries together with automatic retranslation of the results into Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian. The asymmetry of sources and targets in this new arrangement gives an interesting map of where science is now done.

The reasons for English having made a clean sweep of the sciences are not straightforward. Among them we cannot possibly include the unfortunate but widespread idea that English is simpler than other languages.

However, you can’t explain the history and present state of the language of science as the direct result of economic and military might, either. In three instances, languages became science vehicles because the work of a single individual made advances that could not be ignored anywhere else in the world (Liebig for German, Berzelius for Swedish, Mendeleyev for Russian). One language lost its role because of the political folly of its users (German). What we seem to have experienced is not a process of language imposition but of language elimination, in a context where the scientific community needs a means of global communication among its members. The survivor language, English, is not necessarily the best suited to the job; it’s just that nothing has yet happened to knock it out.

One result of the spread of English is that most of the English now spoken and written in the world comes from people who do not possess it natively, making “English speakers” a minority among the users of the language. Much of the English now written by natural and social scientists whose native language is other is almost impenetrable to nonspecialist readers who believe that because they are native English speakers they should be able to understand whatever is written in English. So clumsy and “deviant” is international scientific English that even nonnative wits can have fun with it: