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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." Until the 19th century, classical languages such as Latin, Classical Arabic, Sanskrit, and Classical Chinese were commonly used across 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 revelance 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". 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." In 2022, the Council of the European Union officially supported "initiatives to promote multilingualism" in science, such as the Helsinki declaration. 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 Arabian scholarly texts was translated into Latin, in order for it to 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 never was the sole language of science and education. Beyond local publications, vernaculars very early attained a status of international scientific languages, that 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 the Indian and South Asian region, Sanskrit was a leading vehicular language for science. Sanskrit has been remodeled even more radically than Latin for the purpose of 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 2nd millennium. Sanskrit was increasingly marginalized after the 13th century. Until the end of the 17th century, there was no clear trend of displacement of Latin in Europe by vernacular languages: while in the 16th century, medical books started to use French as well; this trend was reversed after 1597 and most medical literature in France remained only accessible in Latin until the 1680s. In 1670, as many books were printed in Latin as in German in the German states; in 1787, they accounted for no more 10%. At this point, the decline became irreversible: since less and less European scholars were conversant with Latin, publications dwindled and there was less incentive to maintain linguistic training in Latin. The emergence of scientific journals was both a symptom and 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. They both 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 the language standard. French, English, German and the quest for an auxiliary language (1800–1920) The gradual disuse of Latin opened an uneasy transition period as more and more works were only accessible in local languages. Many national European languages held the potential to become a language of science within a specific research field: some scholars "took measures to learn Swedish so they could follow the work of [the Swedish chemist] Bergman and his compatriots." Language preferences and use across scientific communities were gradually consolidated into a triumvirate or triad of dominant languages of science: French, English and German. While each language would be expected to be understood for the purpose of international scientific communication, they also followed "different functional distributions evident in various scientific fields". French had been.... Discover the Agnieszka Ploszaj popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Agnieszka Ploszaj books.