The author’s answer is yes, and English is his choice. Nevertheless, this informative and stimulating text, subtitled “English and the Future of Research,” leaves some things unresolved. A fine writer, geologist Scott Montgomery, wrote, among other books The Scientific Voice (1996), which includes a 70-page chapter on Freud in translation. The present work addresses “Global English” and “What do Former Lingua Francas of Science Tell us?”

 English is spoken by 2 billion people in 120 nations, more or less, and dominates scientific conferences, international publication, lectures, and bridges barriers at many levels, not least of all informal communication. Montgomery expects scientific publication in national languages to continue, though in Scandinavia English is commonly used already in scientific discourse. This is not the case in Latin America, where the home language is also international. Mandarin Chinese, with 900 million users, is growing as a language of science while students from China and India earn one third of US doctoral degrees in science and over half of those in engineering.

Montgomery notes the risk of linguistic tyranny or “linguicide” but plays it down. English language teaching is big business–$50 billion annually–thanks in part to the Internet. “Most communication in the language is between non-native speakers, and this will only grow.” (13). Young people are especially involved, and our language no longer belongs to England and America. “Four factors–children, education, ideas of opportunity and cities–appear to be the determinants in language change today.” (67) Chapter 3, “English and Science” provides a far-ranging yet compact history, including the fact that, since 2000, science and engineering students who study abroad tend to return home, reversing the previous habit of  staying abroad.

 Chapter 4, “Impacts,” deals with applied linguistics. Three (of 9) points: “The global role of English in science has nothing to do with inherent qualities in the language.” It’s simply a result of world history. “Most anglophone researchers are monolingual and cite only papers in English.”  And, an important psychological point: “Many non-native speakers of English suffer from low confidence when they use this language.” (105-6).  Furthermore, “Scientific language begins already several steps removed from ordinary speech; it is specialized, highly formal, rhetorically complex, dependent on a great many obscure terms and difficult to comprehend for anyone outside the immediate discipline… Putting it into a foreign tongue removes it still further. The barrier between scientific knowledge and public discourse grows thicker, taller.” (116). Montgomery notes that scientists from poorer nations ally themselves with fluent English speakers at a cost: less collaboration with colleagues in nearby countries. Meanwhile, in the U.S., few scientists even refer to non-English publications. Another loss to those born into the dominant lingua franca: we bask in comfort but forfeit access to much of the outside world along with the perspective that bilinguals have. 

The penultimate chapter is a fine review of former times, when various languages played the role of English now: Latin, Arabic, Greek, Persian, Sanskrit and Chinese: “The history of science is also a history of languages.” (134). Toward the end in a reflective summary he writes:

”English has expanded further in scientific endeavor than perhaps any other domain. While it is used or studied by over 2 billion people in over two-thirds of the world’s nations it is also the medium for over 90% of international scientific communication in every form, throughout the entire globe. Nothing like this has ever existed before. It is a new era for the voice of science.” (p.168)

“Language has a role in the oldest dream for a better world: the dream of a universal language that allows people everywhere to commune and work together….a unified humanity.” (3) Despite this, Montgomery dismisses constructed languages: “we have had many attempts, from Solresol to Esperanto, and all have failed. With no attachment to any nation, any culture, any living people, with no unique history, origin or status, a synthetic tongue lacks the very content that makes a language fully human.” (21) Unlike a thousand other attempts, Esperanto, created in 1887, has long been a living language with speakers in 120 countries, its own Vikipedio, recognition by UNESCO, and frequent use in conferences around the world. He asks “Should science have more than one global tongue?” but answers “no,” having considered ethnic tongues, ignoring the ethnically neutral language designed for that purpose. Montgomery cites Humphrey Tonkin (US) and Ulrich Ammon (Germany) in his notes, apparently unaware of their expertise in la internacia lingvo.

Linguist and translator Claude Piron estimated that 10,000 hours of study and practice are required for fluency in an ethnic language–a huge commitment and major cost for non-native speakers. But monolinguals who do well because they speak English are missing something. As Goethe said, “One unacquainted with a foreign tongue knows not his own.” Bilinguals acquire cognitive benefits in early childhood along with significant resistance to dementia later in life. Jared Diamond points out, “bilingualism is arguably the most constant practice possible for the brain” and “multilinguals have constant unconscious practice in using the executive function system.” (Science 330: 332, 2010.) Science needs a global language, Montgomery has written a fine book about the obvious choice, English, but his suggestion of a second choice should be reconsidered. 

© 2014 E. James Lieberman

E. James Lieberman is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry emeritus, George Washington University, and co-editor of The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis (2012).