English is now the language we all use to communicate science. But while it may feel inevitable, the domination of English is very recent and may be down to geopolitics and other accidents, argues a new book

Communicating science is tough without a common language (Image: lf Börjesson/Maskot/Plainpicture)

THE evening was warm, the beer was cold, and it was time to catch up. It was the last night of a scientific meeting and I spied three friends: Marie-Anne, whose lab is in Paris; Christian, who’s Swiss but works in Nice; and Thomas (also Swiss), based in Vienna. They were speaking French – the shoulder shrugs gave it away – but they are fluent in German too. As I joined them, they switched seamlessly to English. Well, of course: I’m British, so I only have a smattering of appalling French and German. But they also switched because English is the language of science.

It wasn’t always thus. Replay the scene 150 years earlier, and we would all have been able to communicate in the triumvirate of German, French and English, at least. A few centuries earlier, and it would have been Latin.

Michael Gordin’s excellent Scientific Babel asks what drives the languages science uses, and how English came to dominate. As he writes, “scientific languages are not born, they are made, and made with a good deal of effort”. Gordin uses chemistry to guide our tour because this was the key science during the transition to monolingualism. His story is insightful, engaging and based on superb scholarship, lightly worn.


What a lot of trouble language has caused. For example, after Dmitri Mendeleev first published a table in Russian showing the relationships of the then known elements, he realised he needed to tell a wider audience. So he wrote a short summary, translated into German for Zeitschrift für Chemie.

Mendeleev discovered that the elements were periodic, but this was translated as stufenweise, or “phased”. It was the repeating feature of periodicity that was Mendeleev’s key insight. Reading the mistranslation, Mendeleev’s rival, Julius Lothar Meyer, who had also noticed the periodicity, thought the use of the word “phased” meant that he could therefore claim the discovery of periodicity. In the best tradition of science, an argument ensued. At its nub was that Mendeleev’s first papers were in Russian, which Meyer could not read. As Gordin says, “to count as a significant language of science, it was not enough… to be written in, others had to be persuaded to read it”.

It is the tension between mother tongue and a single language that has pulled and pushed at the languages of science. For example, as science uses a language, words diverge from their everyday meanings – take “compound” or “potential”. This divergence drives a positive feedback loop: as a word in language A acquires a scientific meaning, that makes it more likely that that word (still in language A) will be used.

The babel of languages used in science by the late 19th century was a good argument for a “universal, ideally neutral” language, writes Gordin. The first candidate was Volapük, or “worldspeak”. Then came Esperanto and Ido. These were popular, but crashed with the first world war. Worse followed. Germany’s post-war penalty was severe: exclusion from a globalising science, with many conferences off limits. This led to the inevitable decline of German in science. The second world war accelerated this both by leaching scientists from Nazi Germany, largely to the Anglophone US, and by post-war restructuring.

With German increasingly forced out of the triumvirate, that left French and English. As English overtook German during both world wars, French was squeezed out. And as the “Fe Curtain” (a droll chapter heading) divided Europe, using Russian for science became politically important. Translating Russian into English was vital, so the West could see “what ‘Ivan’ was up to”. This focus on the English of the West versus the Russian of the East only squeezed French still further.

But geopolitics doesn’t entirely account for the hegemony of English. Nor, says Gordin, was there anything innately superior about the language. In fact, there is no one reason for its domination.

Will the dominance of English continue? We may revert from today’s monolingualism (as with Latin) to multiple languages, perhaps a modern triumvirate of Chinese, English and Spanish/Portuguese, as new world orders evolve. Meanwhile, we lucky native English speakers should remember that for everyone else, their scientific working language is no mother to them at all.

We may revert to a modern triumvirate of Chinese, English and Spanish/Portuguese

Scientific Babel: The language of science from the fall of Latin to the rise of English Michael Gordin Profile Books

This article appeared in print under the headline “Speaking in one voice”