Scientific Babel

Scientific Babel,
by Michael Gordin.

Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, and this blog, are written in English. As far as I’m aware, no one has ever translated the book into another language. A few of you may be reading the blog using a program like Google translate, but I doubt it. English is now the universal language of science, so anyone interested in science blogs can probably read what I write.

How did English become so dominant? That story is told in Scientific Babel: How Science was Done Before and After Global English, by Michael Gordin. Much of the book is summarized by the illustration below, adapted from Gordin’s Figure 1.
 

Percentage of the global scientific literature for several languages versus time.
Adapted from Fig. 0.1 in Scientific Babel, by Michael Gordin.

In his introduction, Gordin writes:

English is dominant in science today, and we can even say roughly how much. Sociolinguists have been collecting data for the past several decades on the proportions of the world scientific literature that are published in various tongues, which reveal a consistent pattern. Fig. 0.1 exhibits striking features, and most of the chapters of this book—after an introductory chapter about Latin—move across the same years that are plotted here. In each chapter, I focus on a language or set of languages in order to highlight the lived experience of scientists, and those features are sometimes obscured as well as revealed by these curves. Starting from the most recent end of this figure and walking back, we can begin to uncover elements of the largely invisible story. The most obvious and startling aspect of this graph is the dramatic rise of English beginning from a low point at 1910. The situation is actually even more dramatic than it appears from this graph, for these are percentages of scientific publication—slices of a pie, if you will—and that pie is not static. On the contrary, scientific publication exploded across this period, which means that even in the period from 1940 to 1970 when English seems mostly flat, it is actually a constant percentage of an exponentially growing baseline. By the 1990s, we witness a significant ramp-up on top of an increasingly massive foundation: waves on top of deluges on top of tsunamis of scientific English. This is, in my view, the broadest single transformation in the history of modern science, and we have no history of it. That is where the book will end, with a cluster of chapters focusing on the phenomenon of global scientific English, the way speakers of other once dominant languages (principally French and German) adjusted to the change, preceded by how Anglophones in the Cold War confronted another prominent feature of the midpoint of the graph (1935-1965): the dramatic growth of scientific Russian.

But on second glance, one of the most interesting aspects of this figure is how much of it is not about English, how the story of scientific language correlates with, but does not slavishly follow, the trajectory of globalization. Knowledge and power are bedfellows; they are not twins. Simply swinging our gaze leftward across the graph sets aside the juggernaut of English and allows other, overshadowed aspects of these curves (such as the rise of Russian) to come to the fore. Before Russian, in the period 1910 to 1945, the central feature of the graph is no longer English but the prominent rise and decline of German as a scientific language. German, according to this figure, was the only language ever to overtake English since 1880, and during that era a scientist would have had excellent grounds to conclude that German was well poised to dominate scientific communication. The story of the twentieth century, which from the point of view of the history of globalization is ever-rising English, from the perspective of scientific languages might be better reformulated as the decline of German. That decline started, one can see, before the advent of the Nazi regime in 1933, and one of the main arguments of this book is that the aftermath of World War I was central in cementing both the collapse of scientific German and the ballistic ascent of English. We can move further left still, and in the period from 1880 to 1910 we see an almost equal partition of publications, hovering around 30% apiece for English, French, and German, a set I will call the “triumvirate.” (The existence of the triumvirate is simply observed as a fact in this book; I do not propose to trace the history of its emergence.) French underwent a monotonic decline throughout the twentieth century; one gets the impression (although the data is lacking) that this decline began before our curve does, but to participants in the scientific community at the beginning of our modern story, it appeared stable. My narrative for this earlier period comes in two forms: the emergence of Russian, with a minor peak in the late nineteenth century, as the first new language to threaten to seriously destabilize the triumvirate; and the countervailing alternative (never broadly popular but still quite revealing in microcosm) to replace the multilingual scientific communication system with one conducted in a constructed language such as Esperanto. Long before all of this data, all of these transformations, there was Latin, and that is where the book properly begins.

For all the visual power of the graph, most of this book pushes against its most straightforward reading: the seemingly inexorable rise of English. Behind the graph lie a million stories, and it is history’s task to uncover them….

I’m not skilled with languages. One of my favorite jokes is to brag that “between my wife and I, we know five languages!” My wife Shirley speaks Mandarin Chinese, Fukienese (another dialect of Chinese), Tagalog (the language of the Philippines), Spanish, and English. The punchline, of course, is that I know only English.

We scientists who grew up speaking English are lucky; we don’t need to learn a foreign language to read modern scientific papers. This isn’t fair, but that’s the way it is. I tell my international graduate students that they must learn to write English well, or their careers will suffer. Scientists are judged by their journal articles and grant proposals, and both are documents written in English. I review many papers for journals, and I complain obnoxiously in my critique if the manuscript’s English is not clear. Pity the poor soul who has me as their referee.

Although I don’t speak any foreign languages, that doesn’t mean I have never studied any. In high school I took three years of Latin. I translated sections of Caeser’s Gallic Wars and Cicero’s speeches against Catiline, but slowly and always with my Latin-English dictionary at my side. I never could simply read Latin; I would laboriously translate Latin into English, and then read the English to figure out what the text was talking about. Although my Latin was never fluent, I did learn much about Roman culture. In my junior year of high school, I had the top score in a statewide Junior Classical League exam about Roman history. I love Isaac Asimov’s science fiction and popularizations, but the first books by Asimov that I read were histories: his two volume set The Roman Republic and The Roman Empire.

I ought to know German, because my dad's side of the family all immigrated from Germany. But that was two generations back, and there is little of the old country in our family gatherings. I tried to master French before Shirley and I visited Paris. I learned just enough to buy breakfast: “Bonjour madam,” “Trois croissant,” “Merci.” All went well as long as no one asked me a question.

In college I expected to have a language requirement, and my plan was to take Russian. I started college in 1978, and the figure above explains how at that time Russian was the logical second language for an English-speaking physics student. Ultimately, the University of Kansas accepted FORTRAN as my foreign language, ending any chance of my becoming bilingual.

For those of you interested in how English became the language of science, I recommend Scientific Babel. For those of you interested in how the title of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology is written in various languages, see below (found using Google Translate). Enjoy!