---
title: "Languages of science"
chunk: 5/13
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:11:33.946594+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

During the 1960s and 1970s, English was no longer a majority language of science, but a scientific lingua franca instead. The transformation had more wide-ranging consequences than the replacement of two or three main languages of science by a single language: it marked "the transition from a triumvirate that valued, at least in a limited way, the expression of identity within science, to an overwhelming emphasis on communication and thus a single vehicular language." Ulrich Ammon characterizes English as an "asymmetrical lingua franca", since it is "the native tongue and the national language of the most influential segment of the global scientific community, but a foreign language for the rest of the world." This paradigm is usually associated with the globalization of American and English-speaking culture in the latter part of the 20th century.
No specific event accounts for the full shift, though numerous transformations highlight an accelerated conversion to English science in the later part of the 1960s. On June 11, 1965, US President Lyndon B. Johnson stated that the English language had become a lingua franca that opened "doors to scientific and technical knowledge" and whose promotion should be a "major policy" of the United States. In 1969, the most prestigious collection of abstracts in chemistry in the early 20th century—the German Chemisches Zentralblatt—was discontinued. This polyglot compilation in 36 languages could no longer compete with the English-focused Chemical Abstract, since more than 65% of publications in the field were in English. By 1982, a report of the French Academy of Sciences admitted that "English is by now the international standard language of science and it could very nearly become its unique language", and it is already the main "means of communication" in European countries with a long-standing tradition of publication in local languages such as Germany and Italy. In the European Union, the Bologna Declaration of 1999 "obliged universities throughout Europe and beyond to align their systems with that of the United Kingdom", and it created strong incentives to publish academic results in English. From 1999 to 2014, the number of English-speaking courses in European universities increased tenfold.
Machine translation, which had been booming since 1954 thanks to Soviet-American competition, was immediately affected by the new paradigm. In 1964, the US National Science Foundation underlined that "there is no emergency in the field of translation" and that translators were easily up to the task of making foreign research accessible. Funding stopped simultaneously in the United States and the Soviet Union, and machine translation did not recover from this research "winter" until the 1980s; by that time, translating scientific publications was no longer the main motivation. Research in this area was still pursued in a few countries where bilingualism was an important political and cultural issue; in Canada, for example, the METEO system was successfully established to "translate weather forecasts from English into French".
English content gradually became prevalent in originally non-English journals—first as an additional language, and then as the default language. Before 1998, seven leading European journals had published in their local languages: Acta Physica Hungarica, Anales de Física, Il Nuovo Cimento, Journal de Physique, Portugaliae Physica, and Zeitschrift für Physik. In 1998, these journals merged and became the European Physical Journal, an international journal accepting only English submissions. The same process occurred repeatedly in less prestigious publications:

The pattern has become so routine as to be almost cliché: first, a periodical publishes only in a particular ethnic language (French, German, Italian); then, it permits publication in that language and also a foreign tongue, always including English but sometimes also others; finally, the journal excludes all other languages but English and becomes purely Anglophone.
Early scientific infrastructure was a leading factor in the conversion to a single vernacular language. Critical developments in applied scientific computing and information retrieval systems occurred in the United States after the 1960s. The Sputnik crisis was the main incentive, since it "turned the librarians' problem of bibliographic control into a national information crisis"; in addition, it favored ambitious research plans such as the following:

SCITEL—an ultimately failed proposal to create a centrally planned system of electronic publication in the early 1960s
MEDLINE—for medicine journals
NASA/RECON—for astronomy and engineering
By contrast with the decline of machine translation, scientific infrastructure and databases emerged as a profitable business in the 1970s. Even before the emergence of a global network such as the World Wide Web, "it was estimated in 1986 that fully 85% of the information available in worldwide networks was already in English."
The predominant use of English went beyond the architecture of networks and infrastructures, and it affected the content as well. The Science Citation Index—created by Eugene Garfield in the aftermath of SCITEL—had a significant and lasting influence on the structure of global scientific publication in the last decades of the 20th century, providing its most important metrics. The journal impact factor, "ultimately came to provide the metric tool needed to structure a competitive market among journals." The Science Citation Index had better coverage of English-speaking journals, which gave them a stronger journal impact factor and created incentives to publish in English: "Publishing in English placed the lowest barriers toward making one's work 'detectable' to researchers." Because it was convenient to deal with a monolingual corpus, Eugene Garfield called for acknowledging English as the only international language for science:

Since Current Contents has an international audience, one might say that the ideal publication would be multi-lingual, listing all titles in five languages -- one or more of which is read by most of our subscribers, including German, French, Russian and Japanese, as well as English. This is, of course, impractical since it would quadruple the size of Current Contents (…) the only reasonable solution is to publish as many contents pages in English as is economically and technically feasible. To do this we need the cooperation of publishers and authors.

== Current trends ==