Why Science Speaks English

Open almost any research journal in physics, chemistry, biology or engineering today and it will be in English, whether the authors work in Tokyo, São Paulo or Stuttgart. It was not always so. For centuries scholars wrote in Latin, then in their own languages, and around 1900 a serious chemist needed to read German as well as French and English. English became the shared language of science only in the twentieth century, through two world wars, a wave of émigrés, American money, a Cold War translation effort and the citation databases that now decide careers. This is how that happened, why it has lasted, and what it costs the many scientists who did not grow up speaking it.

A language nobody spoke at home

For roughly two centuries after the printing press, the natural philosophers of Europe had a common language: Latin. It was the language of the universities and the Church, and because it was nobody’s mother tongue by then it gave no nation an advantage. When Isaac Newton set out his laws of motion and universal gravitation in 1687, he did so in Latin, in the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica^[9]. Carl Linnaeus published his scheme for naming and classifying living things, Systema Naturae, in Latin in 1735, and Carl Friedrich Gauss still chose Latin for his treatise on number theory, the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, in 1801^[10].

Latin worked as a lingua franca because the educated already shared it. A Swedish botanist and an Italian astronomer could read each other without translators, and a book printed in Leiden could circulate in Kraków. Latin also lingered longest where precision and stability mattered most. Until the end of 2011, the rules of botany required every new plant species to be validated by a description or diagnosis in Latin; under the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants, English has been accepted as an alternative only since 1 January 2012, and the scientific names themselves remain Latin^[11].

The turn to vernaculars

The shift away from Latin began with some of the most famous names in science. Galileo Galilei announced his telescopic discoveries in Latin, in the Sidereus Nuncius of 1610, but wrote his two great later books, the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) and the Two New Sciences (1638), in Italian. René Descartes published his Discourse on the Method in French in 1637^[10]. Writing in the vernacular reached a wider audience of engineers, merchants and courtiers who had little Latin, and it let authors appeal over the heads of university faculties.

Scientific societies pushed in the same direction. The Royal Society of London, chartered in the 1660s, published its Philosophical Transactions from March 1665 under its secretary Henry Oldenburg, in English^[12]. Newton’s own Opticks appeared in English in 1704. In France, Antoine Lavoisier set out the new chemistry in French in his Traité élémentaire de chimie of 1789^[10].

The cost was clear to contemporaries. In the preliminary discourse to the Encyclopédie in 1751, Jean le Rond d’Alembert noted that French writers had replaced Latin with their own language, and that scholars of other nations had followed their example. Before the end of the eighteenth century, he predicted, a philosopher who wanted to learn thoroughly the discoveries of his predecessors would have to burden his memory with “seven or eight different languages”, and would die before he could begin to learn. He wished, without much hope, for a return to Latin in works of philosophy^{[13, 14]}.

Three languages, one conversation

D’Alembert’s fear did not quite come true. By the late nineteenth century the many vernaculars of science had narrowed to three. The historian of science Michael Gordin, whose Scientific Babel (2015) traces this history, describes an English–French–German “triumvirate”: from roughly 1880 to 1910 the three languages accounted for about 30% each of scientific articles and books^{[1, 10]}. Bibliographic counts compiled by the German sociolinguist Ulrich Ammon show the three running nearly level in this period, French then beginning a long decline, and German peaking around 1920, when it briefly outranked English^[2].

German’s strength rested on the strength of German science. German universities and industrial laboratories led much of chemistry and physics, and reading German was effectively required in medicine, biology and chemistry around 1900^[2]. Ambitious young Americans often spent postdoctoral years at German universities, the reverse of today’s pattern^[5]. The system also had its accidents. When Dmitri Mendeleev reported his periodic system in 1869, a one-page German abstract of the Russian paper rendered “periodic” as stufenweise, “gradual”, and the German chemist Lothar Meyer, who could not read the Russian original, concluded that Mendeleev had missed the periodicity^[4].

Some scientists hoped to escape the problem altogether with a constructed language. In 1907 a delegation working under the International Association of Academies, steered by the French philosopher Louis Couturat, considered scores of proposals and, at the point of choosing Esperanto, endorsed a reformed version called Ido instead, which split the movement^[4]. The physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald championed Ido and even published Ido names for the chemical elements, but after the First World War broke out he abandoned it and urged the spread of German instead^[1]. In Gordin’s account, the nationalist mood of 1914 dealt the constructed languages their first blow, and the rise of English dealt the second. “English solves neither the fairness nor ease-of-acquisition demands,” he has said, “but it nonetheless emerged as the de facto resolution”^[15].

The war that broke German’s reach

The First World War did lasting damage to German as an international language of science. In October 1914, 93 German scholars and artists, including leading scientists, signed the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three defending Germany’s conduct of the war, and it was later cited by Allied academies to justify excluding German colleagues^[16]. The International Research Council, founded in Brussels in July 1919 to coordinate international science, barred the former Central Powers from membership of the council and its scientific unions, and admitted neutral countries only by a three-quarters vote. It deleted the exclusion clause only in 1926, and even then Germany did not join^{[3, 17]}.

The boycott shaped the institutions that would outlast it. Bodies such as the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry were set up with English and French as their only official languages, locking German out of much of international scientific governance^[4]. Many German scientists, for their part, refused to cooperate with organisations set up by their former enemies, which prolonged the split^[16].

In the United States, wartime hostility to Germany fell on the language itself. In April 1919 Nebraska made it a crime to teach any subject in a language other than English to children who had not passed the eighth grade, and a teacher at a parochial school was convicted in 1920 for teaching a ten-year-old to read in German. The Supreme Court struck the law down in Meyer v. Nebraska in 1923^[18]. Gordin argues that the infrastructure that had once let American scientists learn German was largely dismantled, which mattered when the next foreign-language challenge arrived^[5].

Exile and the American century

The second blow came from within Germany. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of April 1933 allowed the new Nazi government to dismiss Jewish and politically suspect civil servants, including university professors. Emmy Noether, one of the leading mathematicians of her time, lost her post in Göttingen that April and spent her last two years at Bryn Mawr^[19]. Hermann Weyl, who held David Hilbert’s former chair, left Göttingen for Princeton in 1933, where Albert Einstein was among the first professors^[20]. Hans Bethe left Munich in 1933 and, after posts in Manchester and Bristol, joined Cornell in 1935^[21]. Exile changed what these scientists published in as well as where they worked: eminent German émigrés mostly published in English after they arrived, while the Nazification of German journals, which now dictated which authors and subjects could appear, further reduced their standing^[1].

The émigrés strengthened American science measurably. Comparing chemistry fields in which dismissed German Jewish scientists had worked with other fields, the economists Petra Moser, Alessandra Voena and Fabian Waldinger found that patenting by US inventors rose by 31% in the émigrés’ fields, mostly because the newcomers drew new researchers into them^[22]. The Second World War then mobilised American science on an unprecedented scale. In 1945 Vannevar Bush, who had directed the wartime research effort, presented President Truman with Science, the Endless Frontier, which argued for permanent federal funding of basic research; the National Science Foundation followed in 1950^[23]. With the largest and richest research system in the world, American journals and laboratories became the place to publish and to train, and their language travelled with them.

The Russian challenge

The one serious rival to English after 1945 was Russian. Soviet science grew quickly, and in 1948 a study found that a third of all scientific papers published in languages other than English were in Russian^[24]. In chemistry, Russian rose from 2.5% of abstracted articles in 1913 to 17% of the abstracts in Chemical Abstracts in 1958, more than German (10%) and French (6%) combined, with English at 50.5%; by 1970 it was 23%^{[1, 5]}. The Soviet Union had earlier sponsored its own journals in German, French and English, but phased them out, the last in 1947. By the 1970s, Gordin notes, the Soviet Union produced as much chemical literature as the United States, and much of it was of high quality^[5].

Few Western scientists could read Russian; in 1947 only 17 American high schools taught it^[24]. The United States tried three remedies. One was crash courses: a 1958 television series, Basic Russian for Technical Reading, expected about 250 viewers and drew more than 10,000. Another was machine translation. Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation wrote in 1949 that a Russian article was “really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols”, and in 1954 Georgetown University and IBM publicly demonstrated an IBM 701 translating Russian sentences. The program knew 250 words and six rules of syntax, and in 1966 a National Academy of Sciences report concluded that human translators were cheaper^[24].

The third remedy worked. From 1955, with a grant from the National Science Foundation, the American Institute of Physics published Soviet Physics–JETP, a cover-to-cover English translation of the Soviet Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, and a commercial firm, Consultants Bureau, built a business translating Soviet journals and eventually produced all of the institute’s translation journals^[24]. Gordin argues that this had an unintended effect. Because Soviet research was now available in English, a scientist in India or China could follow both American and Soviet work by learning a single foreign language, and that language was English^[24]. In Ammon’s figures for the natural sciences, Russian fell from about 11% of publications in 1980 to 2% in 1996, during the years in which the Soviet Union collapsed^[2].

Year	Corpus	English	Other languages
c. 1880–1910	Scientific articles and books (Ammon’s compilation)	about 30%	German and French about 30% each
1913	Abstracted chemistry papers	–	Russian 2.5%
c. 1920	Same compilation as first row	briefly behind German	German at its peak
1958	Chemical Abstracts	50.5%	Russian 17%, German 10%, French 6%
1970	Chemical literature	–	Russian 23%
1980	Natural sciences	74.6%	Russian 10.8%
1996	Natural sciences	90.7%	Russian 2.1%, Japanese 1.7%, German 1.3%, French 1.2%
2000–2020	Web of Science articles	96.4%	–
2000–2020	OpenAlex articles, language labels corrected	about 68%	–
2018	Scopus articles and reviews	–	Chinese 3.8% (6.8% in 2006)

Journals change their language

As readers converged on English, journals in other languages faced a choice between staying national and shrinking, or switching. Angewandte Chemie, the journal of the German Chemical Society, launched an English-language International Edition in 1962. Few non-German chemists had published in it before; in 1986 a quarter of submissions came from outside Germany, and by 2012 the figure was 89%^[26]. Chemistry was unusually forgiving, as the Harvard chemist George Whitesides recalled of reading the German edition in the 1960s: “You can just read the pictures even if you don’t understand the language”^[26].

In France the switch was more contested. By 1987, 90% of the articles in the microbiology series of the Annales de l’Institut Pasteur were already in English, and only 16% of French-speaking authors still submitted in French. When the Pasteur Institute renamed the journal Research in Microbiology in 1989, a senator asked the research minister to reverse the decision. The minister replied that the Institute was a private foundation and the journal had fewer than 500 subscribers, more of them in Japan than in Canada and the French-speaking countries, but he secured bilingual summaries, the acceptance of articles in French and the return of Pasteur’s portrait to the cover^[27].

Physics followed at the end of the century. The German Zeitschrift für Physik merged with most of the French Journal de Physique and the Italian Il Nuovo Cimento in the late 1990s to form the English-language European Physical Journal^[28]. National journals did not disappear, but the leading European titles now competed with American ones in the same language.

Counting what counts

From the 1960s onwards, the language of science was reinforced by the way science came to be measured. In 1955 the American information scientist Eugene Garfield proposed indexing papers by the references they cite^[29]. His Institute for Scientific Information, founded in 1960, built the Science Citation Index, the ancestor of today’s Web of Science, and Garfield’s journal impact factor became a widely used, if much criticised, shorthand for prestige. Elsevier launched a competing database, Scopus, in 2004^[25]. These indexes concentrated on international journals, which increasingly meant journals in English^[6].

The effect on national comparisons can be large. Researchers at Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies showed in 2001 that the German- and French-language papers covered by the Science Citation Index, many of them in medicine, were cited far less than the same countries’ English papers, so including them depressed the measured impact of German and French research; leaving them out lifted both countries markedly^[30]. A 2017 study of six journals from five countries that publish in English and other languages found that English-language articles received more citations even after controlling for journal, year and length^[31].

Coverage also shapes what counts as world science. In Web of Science, 96.4% of articles published from 2000 to 2020 are in English. In OpenAlex, a free index with far broader coverage, the declared figure is 75%, and about 68% after manual correction of language labels; Japanese papers are 31 times more visible there than in Web of Science, and Indonesian outnumbers Russian and Italian^[6]. In Scopus, the share of Chinese-language papers rose from 1.5% in 1996 to 6.8% in 2006, then fell back to 3.8% in 2018^[25].

Governments have amplified these incentives. A study of 168 policy documents from 100 Chinese universities found cash rewards ranging from US$30 to US$165,000 for a single paper in a journal indexed by Web of Science^[32]. In February 2020 China told its institutions to stop paying such bonuses, as part of a policy against perverse publishing incentives^[33].

Why it sticks

Once most of the literature is in one language, every scientist has a reason to read it, and every author has a reason to write in it. This is a classic network effect: a language becomes more useful the more people use it, whatever its intrinsic merits. Gordin has pointed out that the dominant language of science has never simply tracked the number of speakers. If it did, he argues, Spanish, Hindi and Arabic would be major scientific languages today. Since the 1970s, he notes, any scientist has needed at least to read English to follow current work, and anyone who wants to be cited must be read by international colleagues^[15].

China illustrates the point. By the US National Science Board’s count, China produced about 899,000 science and engineering articles in 2022, roughly twice the United States’ 457,000^[34], yet Chinese researchers in the natural sciences mostly publish their results in English^[15]. Exceptions stand out because they are rare. When Toshihide Maskawa, who shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics, gave his Nobel lecture in Stockholm, he delivered it in Japanese^[35].

The overall trend is striking. English accounted for about half of the scientific literature around 1960 and about 90% by 2005^[24]. In Ammon’s data for the natural sciences, its share rose from 74.6% in 1980 to 90.7% in 1996, when it stood at 94.8% in physics, 94.3% in mathematics and 83.2% in chemistry^[2].

The pattern is strongest in the natural sciences. Medicine and the natural sciences mostly address questions that are the same everywhere, and publish in English; the social sciences and humanities, which deal more with particular populations and places, are more likely to publish in local languages^[25]. Even there English has advanced: Ammon’s data put its share of social-science and humanities publications at 82.5% by 1995^[2].

The cost of a common tongue

A shared language brings obvious benefits: one literature, one set of conferences, and collaborators who can understand each other. Scott Montgomery, in Does Science Need a Global Language? (2013), weighs these advantages against the disadvantages, especially for researchers in developing countries where English is not yet firmly established^[36]. The costs fall unevenly, and they have recently been measured.

In a 2023 study, Tatsuya Amano and colleagues surveyed 908 environmental scientists from eight countries: Bangladesh, Bolivia, Britain, Japan, Nepal, Nigeria, Spain and Ukraine. Among researchers who had published one English-language paper, those from countries with moderate English proficiency took a median 46.6% longer than native speakers to read a paper in English, and those from low-proficiency countries 90.8% longer. Writing a paper took early-career researchers from the two groups 50.6% and 29.8% longer. The same researchers needed less time than native English speakers to read and write in their own first languages, which points to English itself, not ability, as the source of the gap^[7].

Publication was harder too. About 38% and 36% of the two groups had had a paper rejected because of its English, against 14.4% of native speakers, a rate 2.5 to 2.6 times higher; requests to improve the English during revision were 12.5 times as frequent. Many non-native speakers also reported skipping English-language conferences, or avoiding oral presentations at them, for lack of confidence in their spoken English^[7]. The burden was heaviest early in careers, when it can decide who stays in science.

What gets lost in translation

The traffic also runs the other way: research in other languages can be missed by everyone else. Searching Google Scholar in 16 languages, Amano and colleagues found that 35.6% of 75,513 documents on biodiversity conservation published in 2014 were not in English. Because so much is published only in English, the reverse problem arises locally too: 54% of the directors of protected areas in Spain said language was a barrier to using the scientific literature^[8].

A follow-up screened 419,679 papers in 16 languages for studies testing conservation interventions and found 1,234 relevant non-English studies, against 4,412 in English. Adding them would extend the evidence to 12–25% more of the world’s area and 5–32% more species, though the non-English studies tended to use less robust designs^[37].

The best-known case comes from medicine. The structure of artemisinin, the antimalarial compound for which Tu Youyou received a share of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, was first published in 1977 in Chinese, under the name of a collaborative research group. In her own account, the political climate in China then restricted publication, apart from several papers in Chinese, and wider recognition came through international meetings in the early 1980s^{[38, 39]}.

Teaching in English

The shift has spread from research to teaching. English-medium instruction, in which universities in non-English-speaking countries teach whole degrees in English, grew rapidly as the Bologna Process brought European degree structures into line^[40]. Surveys by the Academic Cooperation Association counted 725 English-taught bachelor’s and master’s programmes in non-English-speaking European countries in 2001, 2,389 in 2007 and 8,089 in 2014, led by the Nordic countries and the Netherlands^[40].

The Netherlands has gone furthest. In 2023–24, 72.9% of master’s programmes at Dutch research universities were taught only in English, and 29.8% of bachelor’s programmes, with a further 18.6% offered in both languages^[41]. The Nordic governments responded in 2006 with a declaration on language policy calling for “parallel language use”: both the Nordic languages and English should be used for scientific purposes, and universities should plan how to keep both^[42]. Students themselves seem untroubled by the change: Dutch surveys find students equally satisfied with programmes taught in Dutch and in English, and they rate the English of lecturers on English-taught programmes highly^[43].

France took a legal route. The Toubon Law of 1994 gives participants at conferences organised in France by French organisers the right to speak French, and requires publications by public bodies or publicly funded organisations that are written in another language to carry at least a French summary^[44]. A 2013 higher-education law, the loi Fioraso, allowed courses to be taught partly in foreign languages under defined exceptions^[45].

Countercurrents

English is not the whole story. Regional systems publish and index science in other languages, partly because the international indexes leave so much out. A 2005 count in Brazil found 5,986 scientific journals, of which just 17 were covered by the Science Citation Index^[2]. SciELO, which began in 1997 as a project of the São Paulo Research Foundation and the Latin American health-sciences centre BIREME with a pilot of ten Brazilian journals, has operated regularly since June 1998 and extended its model of open online journal collections to other countries^[46]. In China, the CNKI platform serves the large Chinese-language literature; the fall in the Chinese share of Scopus after 2006 shows how much of it sits outside the international indexes^[25].

Technology may loosen the hold of any single language. Neural machine translation and large language models can now render an abstract, or a whole paper, into usable English or out of it in seconds. Emma Steigerwald and colleagues argue that such tools, combined with human checking and multilingual glossaries, could let journals accept and publish work in more languages and move science towards a more multilingual network^[47]. Whether that weakens English or simply makes it easier to use remains to be seen.

None of this was planned, and no one chose English for its grammar or vocabulary. It spread with the people, institutions and money that used it, and every scientist who adopted it made it more useful to the next. For now the pattern that set in during the twentieth century holds. Latin gave way to vernaculars, the vernaculars narrowed to three, and war, migration, money and measurement left one. Gordin ends his history with a caution against assuming permanence: “The history of scientific languages ends here,” he writes, “until it no longer does”^[24].

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