How did science come to speak only English? | Aeon Essays
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Science once communicated in a polyglot of tongues, but now English rules alone. How did this happen – and at what cost?
If you can read this sentence, you can talk with a scientist. Well, maybe not about the details of her research, but at least you would share a common language. The overwhelming majority of communication in the natural sciences today – physics, chemistry, biology, geology – takes place in English; in print and at conferences, in emails and in Skype-mediated collaborations, confirmable by wandering through the halls of any scientific research facility in Kuala Lumpur or Montevideo or Haifa. Contemporary science is Anglophone. More significantly, contemporary science is monoglot: everyone…
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