---
title: "Languages of science"
chunk: 3/13
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"
---

=== English, competitors, and machine translation (1920–1965) ===
The two world wars had a lasting impact on scientific languages. A combination of political, economic, and social factors durably weakened the triumvirate of the three main languages of science in the 19th century; this combination paved the way for the predominance of English in the latter part of the 20th century. There is ongoing debate about whether the world wars accelerated a structural tendency toward English predominance or merely created the conditions for it. Ulrich Ammon wrote that "even without the World Wars the English language community would have gained economic and, consequently, scientific superiority and, thus, preference of its language for international scientific communication." By contrast, Michael Gordin emphasizes that the privileged status of English was far from settled until the 1960s.
The First World War had an immediate impact on the global use of German in academic settings. For nearly a decade after this war, international scientific events boycotted German researchers. The German scientific communities had been compromised by nationalistic propaganda in favor of German science during the war, in addition to the exploitation of scientific research for war crimes. German was no longer acknowledged as a global scientific language. While the boycott did not last, its effects were long-term. In 1919, the International Research Council was created to replace the International Association of Academies, and it used only French and English as working languages. In 1932, fully 98.5% of international scientific conferences admitted contributions in French, 83.5% in English, and only 60% in German. At the same time, the focus of German periodicals and conferences had become increasingly local, and it included research from non-Germanic countries ever less frequently. German never recovered its privileged status as a leading language of science in the United States; due to the lack of alternatives beyond French, American education became "increasingly monoglot" and isolationist. Unaffected by the international boycott, the use of French reached "a plateau between the 1920s and 1940s"; while it did not decline, it did not profit from the marginalization of German, but instead it decreased relative to the expansion of English.
The rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s reinforced the status of English as the leading scientific language. In absolute terms, German publications retained some relevance, but German scientific research was structurally weakened by anti-Semitic and political purges, rejection of international collaborations, and emigration. The German language was not boycotted again in international scientific conferences after the Second World War, since its use had quickly become marginal, even in Germany itself; even after the period of the occupied zone, English (in the West) and Russian (in the East) became major vehicular languages for higher education.
In the two decades after the Second World War, English had become the leading language of science. However, a large share of global research continued to be published in other languages, and language diversity even seemed to increase until the 1960s. Russian publications in numerous fields, especially chemistry and astronomy, had grown rapidly after the war: "in 1948, more than 33% of all technical data published in a foreign language now appeared in Russian." As late as 1962, Christopher Wharton Hanson raised doubts about the future of English as the leading language in science, with Russian and Japanese rising as major languages of science, and the new decolonized states seemingly poised to favor local languages: