As a writer and translator of scientific texts, Scott L. Montgomery has had a front-row seat to an extraordinary development: the rapid ascent of English as the lingua franca of science.
As recently as the 1960s, about 40 percent of scientific research was still published in languages other than English, chiefly German, French, and Russian. By 2000, English’s share of the literature had risen to about 85 percent, and today, 90 percent.
In Does Science Need a Global Language? English and the Future of Research, just out from the University of Chicago Press, Montgomery explains how the dominance of English extends beyond formal science publications to international organizations, corporate correspondence, job and fellowship postings, Web sites, and much else.
Montgomery, a lecturer at the University of Washington’s school of international studies, has published many articles and books about science communication, including Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge Through Cultures and Time (Chicago, 2000) and The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science (2002). He says teaching students from many countries, including former colonies, reminds him that language dominance can provoke resentments. Certainly, he allows, invader tongues have been cruelly installed.
But in science, he contends, researchers recognize that publishing in English increases recognition and opportunities for collaboration. Moreover, the ascendance of English in science is just one facet of a larger phenomenon: English’s rise to the status of the first “truly global language,” Montgomery suggests.
Science’s adoption of one language is less a cause for concern than another instance of a grand tradition, he says, because for millennia, lingua francas have catalyzed major advances in scientific and other learning. In the seventh century, for example, Muslim conquest of much of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa made Arabic the region’s language of politics, military power, literary expression, and science. Throughout the empire, scientific texts were rendered into Arabic.
So, in the 12th century, the scholar Adelard, “the first English scientist,” augmented his Latin with intensive studies of Arabic. He traveled to North Africa and Asia Minor and translated key texts of Islamic science. That brought to Europe the abacus, the astrolabe, Euclid’s geometry, and algebra.
Knowledge held in Arabic had become “a great reservoir and route of passage to the West” for discoveries from as far afield as India and China, says Montgomery. That sparked a 12th-century renaissance in Europe, and “it’s doubtful that the scientific revolution would have happened without it.”
Latin, Greek, Persian, Sanskrit, and Chinese have been lingua francas and tell similar tales, he adds. Even more so, English has become a science conduit. Publication in English can help make findings available to developing countries, and it can bring the science of those countries into a global light. For example, thousands of significant South American science journals are published only in Spanish and Portuguese.
Of course, Montgomery adds, initial publication in English does not prevent second publication in the languages of originating countries. Poland, for example, has invested in converting science publications to English, with the proviso that the work can also appear in Polish without copyright hurdles. In China, by government fiat, 200 leading science journals are switching to publication in English. “They’re not under any illusions Chinese will become the lingua franca of science,” says Montgomery. “That’s possible, but not in the foreseeable future.”
Increasingly scientists in developing countries are getting a grounding in English, as are one-fifth of the world’s children. “It’s viewed as part of internationalizing a country,” says Montgomery. “English is an umbilical cord to the greater world.”
For his book, Montgomery interviewed scores of scientists. Among them are researchers who get by with only a partial grasp of English. “Aziz,” an Egyptian geoscientist who speaks and reads English well but struggles with it in writing, is progressing in his field even though for years he needed Montgomery to translate and edit his prose from scrappy English into something more comprehensible.
Such cases show that English teaching of sufficient sophistication and scale will be a tall order, Montgomery says. In Scandinavia and the Netherlands, however, it has been done. Also important, he argues, is that native speakers of English in the dominant science nations acknowledge that the language comes in many varieties, such as those of West Africa, southern Africa, and South Asia. The educated guess of linguists like David Crystal is that already most communication in English is from non-native speaker to non-native speaker. Montgomery expects that this will be true of science, too, within a generation.
In written communication, “something approaching a global standard” prevails, he says. But he proposes a divergence from that norm that “might seem a bit radical to some"—that journal editors consider an accommodation of localized and nativized varieties of English, such as Indian, Nigerian, and Jamaican, which, although perceived as nonstandard in the oldest English-speaking countries, nonetheless effectively communicate science content.
He reasons that as English advances as the language of science, a valid question is: “Whose English?”
Montgomery doesn’t doubt that journals in the West will retain standard (Anglo-American) written English, and that the science-publishing flagships will continue to be prestigious journals such as Science and Nature.
But he argues that as English evolves and diversifies, as lingua francas always do, editors should emulate their colleagues in, for example, India. There, he notes, many science journals publish papers in Indian scientific English, a subset of South Asian English, a perfectly cohesive language. And plenty of English-language journals in non-English-speaking countries, like China, Brazil, and Russia, allow nonstandard English, too. Elsevier, the Dutch journal megalith, stamps its approval on publications like the Journal of African Earth Sciences, whose editors, based in South Africa and Tanzania, accept nonstandard-English papers from authors in, for example, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea.
For publications like those, says Montgomery, the top priority is clear communication of rigorous science, even if in variant or imperfect but still highly proficient English. He predicts that as such publications circulate more broadly, they and their English could compete with prominent journals in Anglophone countries, particularly because for-profit publishers, which are increasingly prevalent, unsurprisingly want clear communication, which does justice to the reporting of results and also optimizes readership, hence profits.
Montgomery’s contention is that some linguistic flexibility will advance discourse among scientists from more parts of the world. At stake, he believes, are not only the career prospects of speakers of “nonstandard” English but ultimately “the present and future of science.”