These days, pretty much everyone who works in science research is proficient in English. This is, of course, unfair to those scientists who grew up in places where it is not their native language because they are forced to learn a second language in order to read the literature and spread their own ideas. Fortunately, it is a little easier to read and write technical material because one does not have to deal with the pitfalls of metaphors and idioms and colloquialisms, as one might have in other areas. In science, one usually eschews flowery language in favor of directness and the crucial technical terms are usually unambiguous in meaning. In my own career, I have met many scientists from all over the world with whom it was difficult to have general conversations but with whom one could communicate on science quite easily.
But the near-universality of English in science is a relatively new phenomenon and Michael D. Gordin, a professor of contemporary history, traces how that state of affairs came to be.
[C]ontemporary 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.
…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 isn’t 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.
He says that the early dominance of Latin as the language of learning was unusual.
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 nation’s 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.
I’ve long been fascinated by language and how it evolves. This article on its evolution in science was enjoyable and well worth reading completely.
Yes, how languages rise and fall, and their uses, is fascinating.
When I was in grad school (chemistry), part of the required comprehensive exams was passing a reading test of a scientific paper in either French or German. That was dropped long ago, no need for it now.
I’ve always attributed the rise in the use of English to two successive English-speaking economic empires in the 19th and 20th centuries. That may account for it becoming the lingua franca of business, but the domination in science is probably more complex.
If only the Royal Society had stuck with Latin.
Personally, I feel that reading everyday texts like news coverage in some foreign language is much easier than reading scientific texts. In my opinion, a couple of metaphors here and there are nowhere near as problematic as overly long sentences, rarely used terminology, and scientists’ attempts to sound smarter by purposefully making their texts unnecessary hard to decipher. At least in my own field (my university degree is in linguistics), I occasionally get a feeling that authors purposefully make their texts as hard to understand as possible.
Whenever I’m learning some new foreign language (I’m a polyglot), scientific texts will be the last thing I want to read only after I’m already comfortable with reading things like poetry in said language.
Andreas,
I will readily concede that much of scientific papers are poorly written. And don’t get me started on scientific talks!
But despite that, I still think they are easier to read by fellow scientists because even if the language is foreign to them, they usually know quite a bit of the content and so can fill in the gaps caused by language difficulties.
I remember way back in the early 1970’s as a psych undergrad being very frustrated because there was some outstanding Russian work in an area I was interested in, only available in Russian, and almost unobtainable in Canada.
With a bit of help and a good Russian--English dictionary I, probably, could have read a few of the papers but they were not even available.
We should have stuck with Latin. That way, everyone is on the same level.
@ 4 Mano Singham
It may also depend on how structured the format is. In psychology (and a lot of other areas) the format is American Psychology Association format or very close facsimile. It is a very rigid format and one almost always knows where one is in the paper. It makes deciphering a paper much easier in many cases.
I am not sure that atomic energy technicians use “exactly” the same format, but, at least in Canada, the APA manual is their style manual! I find it a bit mind-boggling but….
But I don’t see that happening in business, while it is very obvious in academia (not just science). Companies around the world aren’t predominantly using English to the exclusion of other languages, whether we’re talking about internal communications, telling customers about their products/services, or whatever it may be. There isn’t a sense that they all belong to an international community with common goals and a common need to communicate with one another, like there is in academia.
@ 1 garnetstar
I remember an older cousin managing to convince the Dean of whatever US university he attended for grad school that Grade 13 French in Ontario more than satisfied any language requirement the chemistry Ph.D. program had.
He was very likely totally correct--well as long as the accent was not a problem. I suspect his accent was even worse than mine.
This seems to have it entirely backwards. European intellectuals didn’t “choose” Latin to communicate their scientific thoughts, much less because it was somehow “a fitting vehicle for communicating claims about universal nature”. They came from a culture where Latin had been the universal academic language for many centuries. Science as we know it came into the world within an already Latin-using culture, and just used the same language that had been used for philosophical thoughts of all kinds in medieval western Europe. And one key reason it had developed this way is that Christian services were conducted in Latin and the clergy were thus taught in Latin. It was a universal language of religion, which expanded in the 9th and 10th centuries to become a universal language of bureaucracy and record-keeping (which church officials largely administered), and from there to a universal language of academia. “Science” as a separate category of thought came much later. And if you go further back, and ask why the Christian church “chose” Latin, rather than the Greek of the New Testament, or the Semitic languages of the Old, the answer is that the Roman Empire had facilitated the spread of Latin throughout Europe as a lingua franca in government, bureaucracy and scholarship (though a lot of scholarship in the Empire was conducted in Greek too). The linguistic landscape of post-Roman Europe was still woven through with Latin at every level.
Actually, there were attempts to communicate both philosophy in general and science in particular in other languages throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. King Alfred supported a programme of translating “all the books a man should know” into English (well, Anglo-Saxon), after the Viking raids had decimated the nation’s population of Latinists (though he also founded new schools to teach Latin, and within a generation English scholarship was just as Latinate as any on the continent). Francis Bacon, meanwhile, wrote his On the Advancement of Science in English first, for English audiences, and made his own Latin translations of the first section for an international scholarly audience.
International is the key word here. Europe in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period was much more international than we usually credit. Universities, and Cathedral Schools before them, taught lessons in Latin for students from many countries with many different first languages. Often dialects of the same language were mutually unintelligible. Conducting lessons in a vernacular language was a surefire way to attract so few students your school would not be a viable concern financially, and anyone whose education was not in Latin would be unable to go and teach elsewhere once they graduated (with the ius ubique docendi -- the right to teach anywhere -- the earliest form of doctoral qualification). Medieval populations could not support universities in vernacular languages, and even in Latin they had to draw students from across the continent. In fact our earliest use of the word “nation” in anything like its modern sense comes from a medieval university context -- nationes were groupings of students from the same linguistic or cultural area within a university, and functioned as social clubs, administrative boards and student societies.
Bizarrely enough, there are still academics who write scholarly papers in Latin. Not many, but Classicists and Medievalists who only know minority modern languages (Hungarian, Basque, Estonian, that sort of thing) get their work to a far wider scholarly audience if they use Latin than if they use their own language. Since all academics studying these fields will be familiar with the language, it makes a lot of sense.
cartomancer @9:
Carmina Burana (the full collection, not so much the subset used by Carl Orff) gives us a glimpse of that;
While acquiring an MS in geology, I discovered that many of my professors assisted collaborators in writing in English, when that language was not their first one. I myself have a geologist friend in Vietnam who chats with me via Messenger from time to time, and sometimes asks for an explanation of some scientific English text that isn’t clear. Though I’m not as advanced in the field as he is, I know and understand the language, and I can usually explain things.
I hate for language to be a barrier for anyone. My only language is English, and I feel that I’ve missed out, but learning a new language at age 59 is a challenge.
The creator of Esperanto missed an opportunity. Science could have been the “killer app” that made Esperanto desirable and ubiquitous. He intended the language to be a worldwide means of communication but it never caught on. As a language of science, it could have been a gentle shift for speakers of Latin to a language more like modern French, Italian and Spanish, and not a difficult one for monolingual people to acquire.
Science isn’t the only field where people communicate in technical terms but are incapable of holding conversations. Aside from France, Quebec, and a few other places, all air traffic is communicated in a specialized form of English.
Aside from France, Quebec, and a few other places, all air traffic is communicated in a specialized form of English.
Are you sure about that? My impression was that even there, perhaps excepting local private flights, everything is in that specialized English.
To be honest, if I am landing in Dorval on a Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong, I really do not want my pilot trying to remember his or her primitive French.
Come to think of it, there is a lot of humour to hear two anglophones in Québec talking in French. After about 2 minutes, one realizes that neither of you speaks decent French and one says, “Do you speak English?” Been there, done that. It can be embarrassing.
On the other hand, I remember a very pleasant dinner with an engineer from Algeria where we spoke French during the entire meal. I have about 3 words of Arabic and he did not speak English. My French has been called “really good survival level” French. He did not even wince, that I saw.
jrkrideau @13:
I’d rate mine as merely “survival level”. In Paris about 30 years ago, a fruit vendor short-changed me. Had me pegged as a tourist, I’m sure. Dunno how it came so readily, but I just blurted out “j’ai vous donnez cinquante (francs)”. Surly bastard gave me the right change.
A few years later, I visited the Land of my Forebears (Latvia; my Latvian is worse than my French), and spent some quality time with a Latvian cousin who only spoke Russian. My Russian is about on a par with your Arabic, but we got on famously. I suspect that creative improvised sign language is better than a smattering of shared language. A notion strengthened by another occasion, on which an aunt offered me a drink, and I responded with what I thought was the Latvian for “No thank you. I drank too much last night”. My dad told me I actually said “No thank you. Good evening. I drink too much.” Accurate at the time, but not intended.
14 Rob Grigjanis
I’d rate mine as merely “survival level”.
Well, I once negotiated an oil change for the car in Lourdes so I think mine is a little bit better but not exactly great.
On the short-changed side though, I was have a coke in a café in the local airport in Cairo. The waiter (who appeared to be about 80 and tottering) brought me the bill. It was something like 3 pounds and written in “Arabic” script. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals. Second one down.
I handed him something like 10 pounds and he tottered off to the cashier. On his way back he clumsily shoved some of the change into his pocket. Clearly he did not expect me have been able to read the bill.
I could not help but laugh. I am very obviously North American/Northern European but I had just flown out of Saudi where I had spent the last 3 months reading these numbers in all sorts of math papers. I could probably read the bill better than he could.
I left chuckling. He or his family needed the Cdn$ 1 or less a lot more than I did and and the assumption of the stupid Westerner who cannot even read Eastern Arabic Numerals was great.
@ 14 Rob Grigjanis
I actually said “No thank you. Good evening. I drink too much.”
These things can happen. I once ended up when talking to my French teacher and her associate saying that I was pregnant. Given that I am male, they were a bit taken aback. Well, in actual fact, they both laughed their heads off. But in a friendly way.
In France
I managed to completely confuse Master’s degree and Mistress. The hitchhiker I had picked up seemed a bit confused.