Languages associated with scientific research
Languages of science are vehicular languages used by one or several scientific communities for international communication. According to science historian Michael Gordin, scientific languages are "either specific forms of a given language that are used in conducting science, or they are the set of distinct languages in which science is done." These two terms are different as one describes a distinct prose in a given language, while the other describes which languages are used in mainstream science.
Until the 19th century, classical languages such as Latin, Classical Arabic, Sanskrit, and Classical Chinese were commonly used across Afro-Eurasia for the purpose of international scientific communication. A combination of structural factors, the emergence of nation-states in Europe, the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of colonization entailed the global use of three European national languages: French, German and English. Yet new languages of science such as Russian or Italian had started to emerge by the end the 19th century, to the point that international scientific organizations started to promote the use of constructed languages like Esperanto as a non-national global standard.
After the First World War, English gradually outpaced French and German and became the leading language of science, but not the only international standard. Research in the Soviet Union rapidly expanded in the years following the Second World War, and access to Russian journals became a major policy issue in the United States, prompting the early development of machine translation. In the last decades of the 20th century, an increasing number of scientific publications used primarily English, in part due to the preeminence of English-speaking scientific infrastructures, indexes and metrics like the Science Citation Index. Local languages still remain largely relevant scientificly in major countries and world regions such as China, Latin America, and Indonesia. Disciplines and fields of study with a significant degree of public engagement such as social sciences, environmental studies, and medicine also have a maintained relevance of local languages.
The development of open science has revived the debate over linguistic diversity in science, as social and local impact has become an important objective of open science infrastructures and platforms. In 2019, 120 international research organizations co-signed the "Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication" and called for supporting multilingualism and the development of "infrastructure of scholarly communication in national languages". The 2021 Unesco Recommendation for Open Science includes "linguistic diversity" as one of the core features of open science, as it aims to "make multilingual scientific knowledge openly available, accessible and reusable for everyone." In 2022, the Council of the European Union officially supported "initiatives to promote multilingualism" in science, such as the Helsinki declaration.
History.
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 Arabian scholarly texts was translated into Latin, in order for it to 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 never was the sole language of science and education. Beyond local publications, vernaculars very early attained a status of international scientific languages, that 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 the Indian and South Asian region, Sanskrit was a leading vehicular language for science. Sanskrit has been remodeled even more radically than Latin for the purpose of 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 2nd millennium. Sanskrit was increasingly marginalized after the 13th century. Until the end of the 17th century, there was no clear trend of displacement of Latin in Europe by vernacular languages: while in the 16th century, medical books started to use French as well; this trend was reversed after 1597 and most medical literature in France remained only accessible in Latin until the 1680s. In 1670, as many books were printed in Latin as in German in the German states; in 1787, they accounted for no more 10%. At this point, the decline became irreversible: since less and less European scholars were conversant with Latin, publications dwindled and there was less incentive to maintain linguistic training in Latin.
The emergence of scientific journals was both a symptom and 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. They both 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 the language standard.
French, English, German and the quest for an auxiliary language (1800–1920).
The gradual disuse of Latin opened an uneasy transition period as more and more works were only accessible 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 would be expected to be understood for the purpose of international scientific communication, they also followed "different functional distributions evident in various scientific fields". French had been almost acknowledged as the international standard of European science in the late 18th century, and remained "essential" throughout the 19th century. German became a major scientific language within the 19th century as it "covered portions of the physical sciences, particularly physics and chemistry, plus mathematics and medicine." English was largely used by researchers and engineers, due to the seminal contribution of English technology to the Industrial Revolution.
In the years preceding the First World War, linguistic diversity of scientific publications increased significantly. The emergence of modern nationalities and early decolonization movements created new incentives to publish scientific knowledge in one's national language. Russian was one of the most successful developments of a new language of science. In the 1860s and 1870s, Russian researchers in chemistry and other physical sciences ceased to publish in German in favor of local periodicals, following a major work of adaptation and creation of names for scientific concepts or elements (such as chemical compounds). A controversy over the meaning of the periodic table of Dmitri Mendeleev contributed to the acknowledgement of original publications in Russian in the 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 be significantly disrupted in the near future by the use of as many as "twenty" languages of science:
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;Today with the recrudescence of certain minor linguistic units and the increased nationalistic spirit of certain larger ones, we face a time when scientific publications of value may appear in perhaps twenty languages [and] be facing an era in which important publications will appear in Finnish, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Serbian, Irish, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindustani, Japanese, Chinese.
The definition of an auxiliary language for science became a major issue discussed in the emerging international scientific institutions. On January 17, 1901, the newly established International Association of Academies created a "Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language" "with support from 310 member organizations". The Delegation was tasked to find an auxiliary language that could be used for "scientific and philosophical exchanges" and 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 non-neutral choice. The Delegation had consequently a limited set of options that included the unlikely revival of a classical language like 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 primarily conceived as a scientific language. Yet, by the early 1900s, it was by far the most successful constructed language, with a large international community as well as 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, as the extensive system of derivation of Esperanto made it complicated to import directly 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. Significant criticism was nevertheless 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 the Esperanto, Ido, which was submitted very late in the process by an unknown contributor. While it was framed as a compromise between the esperantist and the anti-esperantist factions, this decision ultimately disappointed all the proponents of an international medium for scientific communication and durably harmed the adoption of constructed languages in academic circles.
A transition period: English, new 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 19th century and paved the way for the domination in English in the latter part of the 20th century. There is still ongoing debate as to whether the world wars accelerated a structural tendency toward English predominance or merely created the conditions for it. For Ulrich Ammon, "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." In contrast, Michael Gordin underlines that until the 1960s the privileged status of English was far from settled.
The First World War had an immediate impact on the global use of German in academic settings. For nearly a decade after the First World War, German researchers were boycotted by international scientific events. The German scientific communities had been compromised by nationalistic propaganda in favor of "German science" during the war, as well as by the exploitation of scientific research for war crimes. German was no longer acknowledged as a global scientific language. While the boycott did not last, its effects were long-term. In 1919 the International Research Council was created to replace the International Association of Academies and used only French and English as working languages. In 1932, almost all (98.5%) of international scientific conferences admitted contributions in French, 83.5% in English and only 60% in German. In parallel, the focus of German periodicals and conferences had become increasingly local, and less and less frequently included research from non-Germanic countries. German never recovered its privileged status as a leading language of science in the United States, and due to the lack of alternatives beyond French, American education became "increasingly monoglot" and isolationist. Not