---
title: "Languages of science"
chunk: 7/13
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:39:42.114015+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Persistence of linguistic diversity ===
Several languages have retained a secondary status as an international language of science, due to the extent of the local scientific production or to their continued use as a vehicular language in specific contexts. These languages generally include "Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish." Local languages have remained prevalent in major scientific countries: "most scientific publications are still published in Chinese in China".
Empirical studies of the languages used in scientific publications have long been constrained by structural bias in the most readily accessible sources—commercial databases such as the Web of Science. Atypical access to a large corpus not covered by global indexes showed that multilingualism remains non-negligible, although little studied; as of 2022, there are "few examples of analyses at scale" for multilingualism in science. However, a 2026 study found that the proportion of English publications in Dimensions went down from 93.86% in 1990 to 85.52% in 2023, with Indonesian, Spanish and Portuguese expanding at a faster rate than English. 
In seven European countries with limited international reach for each local language, one third of researchers in social sciences and the humanities publish in two or more languages; "research is international, but multilingual publishing keeps locally relevant research alive with the added potential for creating impact." Because of the discrepancy between actual practices and their visibility, multilingualism has been described as a "hidden norm of academic publication".
Overall, the social sciences and the humanities (SSH) have preserved more diverse linguistic practices; "while natural scientists of any linguistic background have largely shifted to English as their language of publication, social scientists and scholars of the humanities have not done so to the same extent." In these disciplines, the need for global communication is balanced by the significance for local culture; "the SSH are typically collaborating with, influencing and improving culture and society. To achieve this, their scholarly publishing is partly in the native languages." Nevertheless, the distinctiveness of the social sciences and the humanities in this regard was progressively reduced after 2000; by the 2010s, a large proportion of German and French articles on art and the humanities (as indexed in the Web of Science) were in English. While German has been outpaced by English even in Germanic-speaking countries since the Second World War, German continues to be marginally used as a vernacular scientific language in specific disciplines or research fields (the so-called Nischenfächer or "niche-disciplines"). Linguistic diversity is not specific to the social sciences, but this persistence may be obscured by the high prestige attached to international commercial databases; in the Earth sciences, "the proportion of English-language documents in the regional or national databases (KCI, RSCI, SciELO) was approximately 26%, whereas virtually all the documents (approximately 98%) in Scopus and WoS were in English."
Beyond the general distinction between the social sciences and the natural sciences, there are finer-grained distributions of language practices. In 2018, a bibliometric analysis was performed on the publications in the social sciences and the humanities of eight European countries; this analysis highlighted that "patterns in the language and type of SSH publications are related not only to the norms, culture, and expectations of each SSH discipline but also to each country's specific cultural and historic heritage." The use of English was more prevalent in Northern Europe than in Eastern Europe, and publication in the local languages remains especially significant in Poland due to a large "'local' market of academic output". Local research policies may have a significant impact: preference for international commercial database (such as Scopus or the Web of Science) may account for a steeper decline in publications in the local language in the Czech Republic, relative to Poland. Additional factors include the distribution of economic models within the journals; non-commercial publications have much stronger "language diversity" than do commercial publications.
Since the 2000s, the expansion of digital collections has contributed to a relative increase in linguistic diversity in academic indexes and search engines. The Web of Science enhanced its regional coverage during 2005-2010, which caused the index to "increase the number of non-English papers such as Spanish papers". In Portuguese research communities, there has been a sharp increase in Portuguese-language papers in commercial indexes during 2007-2018, which is indicative of remaining "spaces of resilience and contestation of some hegemonic practices" and of a potential new paradigm in scientific publishing "steered towards plurilingual diversity". Multilingualism as a practice and competency has also increased; as of 2022, 65% of early-career researchers in Poland had published in two or more languages, whereas only 54% of the older generations had done so.
In 2022, Bianca Kramer and Cameron Neylon led a large-scale analysis of the metadata available for 122 million objects indexed with a digital object identifier (DOI) by the Crossref organization. Overall, non-English publications made up "less than 20%", although this percentage could be underestimated for two reasons: a lower adoption rate for DOIs, or the use of local DOIs (for example, through the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure). Nevertheless, multilingualism seems to have improved during the last 20 years, with a significant increase in publications in Portuguese, Spanish, and Indonesian.