ED. FRONTLINES: English has become the language of science

By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK

Between 1980 and 1996, natural science publications in Russian fell from 10.8 to 2.1 percent. German dropped from 2.5 to 1.2 percent. But English rose from 74.6 to 90.7 percent. This surge in English publications did not come from American authors or other native speakers of English. This increase came from “non-native Anglophones”—scientists who learned English as a second language.

Further data and the reasons for the rise of English as the “lingua franca” of science are available in  two well-researched books: “Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English” by Michael D. Gordon in 2015 and “Does Science Need a Global Language?: English and the Future of Research” by Scott L. Montgomery in 2013.

American readers might want to believe the adoption of English is due to U.S. superiority. But both authors clearly show how English has its dominant status because of economic factors and current history, not any cultural superiority. The percentage of science publications by American researchers has actually declined in recent years.  

English is a rather difficult language, often not following rules of grammar and pronunciation. And there are many “World Englishes” with variations from England to America to India and Pakistan to Africa and Australia. —Thus “color” versus “colour” and endings of “-ising” or “-izing” etc.

A major driver of changing languages in science was warfare. German was a major world language in the physical sciences in the late 1800s. But after both World Wars, German scientists and the German language was shunned. Those German scientists who fled wartime Europe learned the language of their adopted country and most published in English. This issue arises again today. Teams of scientists around the world are constantly working together to solve complex problems. But some in the world science community are now discussing whether they can or should cooperate with Russian scientists.

Meanwhile, American viewers of television news should notice that interviews with Ukrainians find some speak quite good English. And it is obvious that many also speak both Ukrainian and Russian. Indeed, fully half of the population of European Union countries speak two or more languages. This is also the case in much of the less-developed world, where folks in India usually speak their local Hindi, Tamil or Bengali in addition to learning the India dialect of British English in school.  

It is Americans who generally speak only one language. Of the seven percent of Americans who speak a second language, many are recent immigrants.  But since most science publishing is now in English worldwide, why learn a second language? The answer is simple, but hard to explain to a person who only speaks one language and therefore thinks that all people in the world “think alike.” Simply, different languages break the world into slightly different terms and therefore mental concepts. For instance, our word “rights” translates into “responsibility” and our word “individualism” translates into “selfishness”—in Chinese.  

One shortcoming of these two books is that they do not describe the major switch in China in the 1980s, from studying Russian as a second language to studying English. Today, if every person in the U.S. studied Chinese, we could not match the number of Chinese who have studied English beginning in elementary school. This provides them with a massive advantage not only in international commerce but also is one of several reasons they surpassed the U.S. in numbers of STEM doctorates in 2007 and in published science research articles in 2017.

Americans are particularly gullible when it comes to computer claims. We expect machine translation to take care of translation for us. Both authors dismiss this excuse. Gordon notes that in 1958, philosopher Bar-Hillel who had convened the first machine translation conference at MIT finally came to the conclusion that “‘...fully automatic, high-quality translation,’ the stated goal of most research programs, was impossible, ‘not only in the near future but altogether.” This was due to communication being more than algorithmic rules but relying on semantics, the requirement for experiences to provide meaning. Thus “‘perfect’ translation is neither humanly nor mechanically achievable....”  

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John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities during 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.