---
title: "Languages of science"
chunk: 1/13
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"
---

Languages of science are vehicular languages used by one or several scientific communities for international communication. According to the science historian Michael Gordin, scientific languages are "either specific forms of a given language that are used in conducting science, or they are the set of distinct languages in which science is done." These two meanings are different, since the first describes a distinct prose in a given language (i.e., scientific writing), while the second describes which languages are used in mainstream science.

Until the 19th century, classical languages—such as Latin, Classical Arabic, Sanskrit, Classical Malay and Classical Chinese—were commonly used across Afro-Eurasia for international scientific communication. A combination of structural factors, the emergence of nation-states in Europe, the Industrial Revolution, and the expansion of colonization entailed the global use of three European national languages: French, German, and English. Yet new languages of science, such as Russian and Italian, had started to emerge by the end of the 19th century—to the point that international scientific organizations began promoting the use of constructed languages such as Esperanto as a non-national global standard.
After the First World War, English gradually outpaced French and German; it became the leading language of science, but not the only international standard. Research in the Soviet Union (USSR) rapidly expanded in the years after the Second World War, and access to Russian journals became a major policy issue in the United States, prompting the early development of machine translation. In the last decades of the 20th century, an increasing number of scientific publications were written primarily in English, in part due to the preeminence of English-speaking scientific infrastructure, indexes, and metrics such as the Science Citation Index. Local languages remain largely relevant for science in major countries and world regions such as China, Latin America, and Indonesia. Disciplines and fields of study with a significant degree of public engagement—such as social sciences, environmental studies, and medicine—have also maintained the relevance of local languages.

The development of open science has revived the debate over linguistic diversity in science, as social and local impact has become an important objective of open science infrastructure and platforms. In 2019, 120 international research organizations cosigned the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication; they also called for supporting multilingualism and the development of an "infrastructure of scholarly communication in national languages". In 2021, UNESCO's Recommendation for Open Science included "linguistic diversity" as one of the core features of open science, since this diversity aims to "make multilingual scientific knowledge openly available, accessible and reusable for everyone." In 2022, the Council of the European Union officially supported "initiatives to promote multilingualism" in science, such as the Helsinki Initiative.

== History ==

=== From classical languages to vernaculars ===
Until the 19th century, classical languages played an instrumental role in the diffusion of languages in Europe, Asia, and North Africa.
In Europe, starting in the 12th century, Latin was the primary language of religion, law, and administration until the Early Modern period. It became a language of science "through its encounter with Arabic"; during the Renaissance of the 12th century, a large corpus of Arabic scholarly texts was translated into Latin, so that it would be available in the emerging network of European universities and centers of knowledge. In this process, the Latin language changed and acquired the specific features of scholastic Latin through numerous lexical and even syntactic borrowings from Greek and Arabic. The use of scientific Latin persisted long after the replacement of Latin by vernacular languages in most European administrations: "Latin's status as a language of science rested on the contrast it made with the use of the vernacular in other contexts" and created "a European community of learning" entirely distinct from the local communities where the scholars lived. Latin was never the sole language of science and education. Beyond local publications, vernaculars quite early attained the status of international scientific languages, which could be expected to be understood and translated across Europe. In the mid-16th century, a significant amount of printed output in France was in Italian.
In India and South Asia, Sanskrit was a leading vehicular language for science. Sanskrit was remodeled even more radically than Latin for scientific communication, as it shifted "toward ever more complex noun forms to encompass the kinds of abstractions demanded by scientific and mathematical thinking." Classical Chinese held a similarly prestigious position in East Asia, being largely adopted by scientific and Buddhist communities beyond the Chinese Empire, notably in Japan and Korea.
Classical languages declined throughout Eurasia during the second millennium. Sanskrit was increasingly marginalized after the 13th century. Until the end of the 17th century in Europe, Latin resisted displacement by vernacular languages: although medical books in the 16th century began to use French as well, this trend was reversed after 1597, and most medical literature in France remained accessible only in Latin until the 1680s. In 1670, as many books were printed in Latin as in German in the German states; in 1787, such books accounted for no more than 10% of the total. At this point, Latin's decline became irreversible: since ever fewer European scholars were conversant with the language, publications using it dwindled, and there was reduced incentive to maintain linguistic training in Latin.
The emergence of scientific journals was both a symptom and a cause of the declining use of a classical language. The first two modern scientific journals were published simultaneously in 1665: the Journal des Sçavans in France and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in England. Both journals used the local vernacular, which "made perfect historical sense", as both the Kingdom of France and the Kingdom of England were engaged in an active policy of linguistic promotion of their language standard.