From classical languages to vernaculars Until the 19th century,
classical languages played an instrumental role in the diffusion of languages in
Europe,
Asia, and
North Africa. In Europe, starting in the 12th century, Latin was the primary language of religion, law, and administration until the
Early Modern period. It became a language of science "through its encounter with Arabic"; during the Renaissance of the 12th century, a large corpus of Arabic scholarly texts was translated into Latin, so that it would be available in the emerging network of European universities and centers of knowledge. In this process, the Latin language changed and acquired the specific features of scholastic Latin through numerous lexical and even syntactic borrowings from Greek and Arabic. The use of scientific Latin persisted long after the replacement of Latin by vernacular languages in most European administrations: "Latin's status as a language of science rested on the contrast it made with the use of the vernacular in other contexts" and created "a European community of learning" entirely distinct from the local communities where the scholars lived. Latin was never the sole language of science and education. Beyond local publications, vernaculars quite early attained the status of international scientific languages, which could be expected to be understood and translated across Europe. In the mid-16th century, a significant amount of printed output in France was in Italian. In
India and
South Asia,
Sanskrit was a leading vehicular language for science. Sanskrit was remodeled even more radically than Latin for scientific communication, as it shifted "toward ever more complex noun forms to encompass the kinds of abstractions demanded by scientific and mathematical thinking."
Classical Chinese held a similarly prestigious position in
East Asia, being largely adopted by scientific and Buddhist communities beyond the Chinese Empire, notably in Japan and Korea. Classical languages declined throughout Eurasia during the second millennium. Sanskrit was increasingly marginalized after the 13th century. Until the end of the 17th century in Europe, Latin resisted displacement by vernacular languages: although medical books in the 16th century began to use French as well, this trend was reversed after 1597, and most medical literature in France remained accessible only in Latin until the 1680s. In 1670, as many books were printed in Latin as in German in the German states; in 1787, such books accounted for no more than 10% of the total. At this point, Latin's decline became irreversible: since ever fewer European scholars were conversant with the language, publications using it dwindled, and there was reduced incentive to maintain
linguistic training in Latin. The emergence of scientific journals was both a symptom and a cause of the declining use of a classical language. The first two modern scientific journals were published simultaneously in 1665: the
Journal des Sçavans in France and the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in England. Both journals used the local vernacular, which "made perfect historical sense", as both the
Kingdom of France and the
Kingdom of England were engaged in an active policy of linguistic promotion of their language standard.
European and auxiliary languages (1800–1920) The gradual disuse of Latin opened an uneasy transition period, as more and more works were accessible only in local languages. Many national European languages held the potential to become a language of science within a specific research field: some scholars "took measures to learn Swedish so they could follow the work of [the Swedish chemist]
Bergman and his compatriots." Language preferences and use across scientific communities were gradually consolidated into a
triumvirate or
triad of dominant languages of science: French, English, and German. While each language could be expected to be understood for international scientific communication, each also followed "different functional distributions evident in various scientific fields". French had been almost acknowledged as the international standard for European science in the late 18th century, and it remained "essential" throughout the 19th century. German became a major scientific language during the 19th century, since it "covered portions of the physical sciences, particularly physics and chemistry, in addition to mathematics and medicine." Russian was one of the most successful developments as a new language of science. During the 1860s and 1870s, Russian researchers in chemistry and other physical sciences ceased publishing in German in favor of local periodicals (in Russian), following major work in adapting and creating names for scientific concepts or elements (such as chemical compounds). A controversy over the meaning of
Dmitri Mendeleev's
periodic table contributed to acknowledging original publications in Russian in global scientific debate: the original version was deemed more authoritative than its first "imperfect" translation in German. Linguistic diversity became framed as a structural problem that ultimately limited the spread of scientific knowledge. In 1924, the linguist
Roland Grubb Kent underlined that scientific communication could soon be significantly disrupted by the use of as many as "twenty" languages of science: The definition of an auxiliary language for science became a major issue discussed in emerging international scientific institutions. On January 17, 1901, the newly established
International Association of Academies created the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language "with support from 310 member organizations". This delegation was tasked with finding an auxiliary language that could be used for "scientific and philosophical exchanges", and it could not be any "national language". In the context of increased nationalistic tensions, any of the dominant languages of science would have appeared as a partisan choice. The delegation consequently had a limited set of options: these included the unlikely revival of a classical language such as Latin, or a new constructed language such as
Volapük,
Idiom Neutral, or
Esperanto. Throughout the first part of the 20th century, Esperanto was seriously considered as a potential international language of science. As late as 1954, UNESCO passed a recommendation to promote the use of Esperanto for scientific communication. In contrast with Idiom Neutral—or the simplified version of Latin,
Interlingua—Esperanto was not conceived primarily as a scientific language. Yet, by the early 1900s, Esperanto was by far the most successful constructed language, with a large international community and numerous dedicated publications. Starting in 1904, the
Internacia Science Revuo aimed to adapt Esperanto to the specific needs of scientific communication. The development of a specialized technical vocabulary was a challenging task, since Esperanto's extensive derivation system made it complicated to directly import words commonly used in German, French, or English scientific publications. In 1907, the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language seemed close to retaining Esperanto as its preferred language. Nevertheless, significant criticism was still addressed at a few remaining complexities of the language, as well as its lack of scientific purpose and technical vocabulary. Unexpectedly, the delegation supported a new variant of Esperanto,
Ido, which was submitted late in the process by an unknown contributor. While this decision was framed as a compromise between the Esperantist and the anti-Esperantist factions, it ultimately disappointed all proponents of an international medium for scientific communication, and it durably harmed the adoption of constructed languages in academic circles.
English, competitors, and machine translation (1920–1965) The two
world wars had a lasting impact on scientific languages. A combination of political, economic, and social factors durably weakened the triumvirate of the three main languages of science in the 19th century; this combination paved the way for the predominance of English in the latter part of the 20th century. There is ongoing debate about whether the world wars accelerated a structural tendency toward English predominance or merely created the conditions for it. Ulrich Ammon wrote that "even without the World Wars the English language community would have gained economic and, consequently, scientific superiority and, thus, preference of its language for international scientific communication." By contrast, Michael Gordin emphasizes that the privileged status of English was far from settled until the 1960s. The First World War had an immediate impact on the global use of German in academic settings. In 1932, fully 98.5% of international scientific conferences admitted contributions in French, 83.5% in English, and only 60% in German. At the same time, the focus of German periodicals and conferences had become increasingly local, and it included research from non-Germanic countries ever less frequently. Unaffected by the international boycott, the use of French reached "a plateau between the 1920s and 1940s"; while it did not decline, it did not profit from the marginalization of German, but instead it decreased relative to the expansion of English. The German language was not boycotted again in international scientific conferences after the Second World War, since its use had quickly become marginal, even in Germany itself; even after the period of the occupied zone, English (in the West) and Russian (in the East) became major vehicular languages for higher education. In the two decades after the Second World War, English had become the leading language of science. However, a large share of global research continued to be published in other languages, and language diversity even seemed to increase until the 1960s. Russian publications in numerous fields, especially chemistry and astronomy, had grown rapidly after the war: "in 1948, more than 33% of all technical data published in a foreign language now appeared in Russian." As late as 1962,
Christopher Wharton Hanson raised doubts about the future of English as the leading language in science, with Russian and Japanese rising as major languages of science, and the new decolonized states seemingly poised to favor local languages: The expansion of Russian scientific publishing became a source of recurring tension in the United States during the decade of the
Cold War. Very few American researchers were able to read Russian, which contrasted with a remaining widespread familiarity with the two oldest languages of science, French and German. "In a 1958 survey, 49% of American scientific and technical personnel claimed they could read at least one foreign language, yet only 1.2% could handle Russian." Leading figures in computing, such as Norbert Wiener, were initially reluctant. Nevertheless, several well-connected science administrators in the US, such as
Warren Weaver and
Léon Dostert, established a series of major conferences and experiments in the nascent field, out of a concern that "translation was vital to national security". It was not disclosed at the time that these sentences had been purposely selected for their suitability for automated translation. At most, Dostert argued that "scientific Russian" was easier to translate, since it was more formulaic and less grammatically diverse than everyday Russian.
Machine translation became a major priority in US federal research funding in 1956 because of an emerging
arms race with Soviet researchers. While the Georgetown–IBM experiment did not have a large impact in the United States initially, it was immediately noticed in the USSR. The first articles in the field appeared in 1955; only a year later, a major conference was held that attracted 340 representatives. In 1956, Léon Dostert secured significant funding with the support of the
CIA, and he had enough resources to overcome the technical limitations of existing computing infrastructure. In 1957, automated translation from Russian to English could run on a vastly expanded dictionary of 24,000 words, and it could rely on hundreds of predefined syntax rules. At this scale, automated translation remained costly, since it relied on numerous computer operators using thousands of punch cards.
English as a global standard (1965 onward) During the 1960s and 1970s, English was no longer a majority language of science, but a scientific
lingua franca instead. The transformation had more wide-ranging consequences than the replacement of two or three main languages of science by a single language: it marked "the transition from a triumvirate that valued, at least in a limited way, the expression of identity within science, to an overwhelming emphasis on communication and thus a single vehicular language." This paradigm is usually associated with the
globalization of American and English-speaking culture in the latter part of the 20th century. From 1999 to 2014, the number of English-speaking courses in European universities increased tenfold. Machine translation, which had been booming since 1954 thanks to Soviet-American competition, was immediately affected by the new paradigm. In 1964, the US
National Science Foundation underlined that "there is no emergency in the field of translation" and that translators were easily up to the task of making foreign research accessible. English content gradually became prevalent in originally non-English journals—first as an additional language, and then as the default language. Before 1998, seven leading European journals had published in their local languages
: Acta Physica Hungarica,
Anales de Física,
Il Nuovo Cimento,
Journal de Physique,
Portugaliae Physica, and
Zeitschrift für Physik. In 1998, these journals merged and became the
European Physical Journal, an international journal accepting only English submissions. The same process occurred repeatedly in less prestigious publications: Early scientific infrastructure was a leading factor in the conversion to a single vernacular language. Critical developments in applied scientific computing and information retrieval systems occurred in the
United States after the 1960s. The Sputnik crisis was the main incentive, since it "turned the librarians' problem of bibliographic control into a national information crisis"; in addition, it favored ambitious research plans such as the following: •
SCITEL—an ultimately failed proposal to create a centrally planned system of electronic publication in the early 1960s •
MEDLINE—for medicine journals • NASA/RECON—for astronomy and engineering By contrast with the decline of machine translation, scientific infrastructure and databases emerged as a profitable business in the 1970s. Even before the emergence of a global network such as the
World Wide Web, "it was estimated in 1986 that fully 85% of the information available in worldwide networks was already in English." The predominant use of English went beyond the architecture of networks and infrastructures, and it affected the content as well. The
Science Citation Index—created by Eugene Garfield in the aftermath of
SCITEL—had a significant and lasting influence on the structure of global scientific publication in the last decades of the 20th century, providing its most important metrics. The
journal impact factor, "ultimately came to provide the metric tool needed to structure a competitive market among journals." The Science Citation Index had better coverage of English-speaking journals, which gave them a stronger journal impact factor and created incentives to publish in English: "Publishing in English placed the lowest barriers toward making one's work 'detectable' to researchers." Because it was convenient to deal with a monolingual corpus, Eugene Garfield called for acknowledging English as the only international language for science: ==Current trends==