Languages of science

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Scientific languages are vehicular languages used by one or several scientific communities for international communication. According to science historian Michael Gordin, they 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."^[1]

Until the 19th century, classical languages such as Latin, Classical Arabic, Sanskrit, and Classical Chinese were commonly used across Afro-Eurasia for the purpose of 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 or Italian had started to emerge by the end the 19th century, to the point that international scientific organizations started to promote the use of constructed languages like Esperanto as a non-national global standard.

After the First World War, English gradually outpaced French and German and became the leading language of science, but not the only international standard. Research in the Soviet Union rapidly expanded in the years following 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 used primarily English, in part due to the preeminence of English-speaking scientific infrastructures, indexes and metrics like the Science Citation Index. Local languages still remain largely relevant scientificly 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 also have a maintained 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 infrastructures and platforms. In 2019, 120 international research organizations co-signed the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication and called for supporting multilingualism and the development of "infrastructure of scholarly communication in national languages".^[2] The 2021 Unesco Recommendation for Open Science includes "linguistic diversity" as one of the core features of open science, as it aims to "make multilingual scientific knowledge openly available, accessible and reusable for everyone."^[3] In 2022, the Council of the European Union officially supported "initiatives to promote multilingualism" in science, such as the Helsinki declaration.^[4]