English Is the Language of Science

That’s lousy luck for scientists in most of the world.

Laboratory assistant working with a microscope at the Ngoma health center on February 5, 2014 in Ngoma, Rwanda.
A laboratory assistant works with a microscope at the Ngoma Health Center on Feb. 5, 2014, in Ngoma, Rwanda.

I learned English as a second language. Becoming an Anglophone turned out to be a crucial advantage in a brief scientific career years later. (I once worked as a medicinal chemist.) English is de rigueur for many things, but especially for science. More than three-quarters of scientific papers today are published in English—and in some fields it is more than 90 percent, according to data compiled by Scott Montgomery in his book Does Science Need a Global Language?.

As recently as the 1960s, some 40 percent of scientific literature was published in French, German, or Russian. Taxonomy has a Latin naming system, and astronomy is peppered with Arabic- and Persian-named stars—reminders of places where scientific prestige was once concentrated. As a student struggling with organic chemistry, I had the benefit of a German-speaking roommate to elucidate the mysterious nomenclature of so-called “e-” and “z-” molecular configurations: The estands for entgegen, meaning opposite; z is for zusammen, meaning together. The fact that the inventors of this naming convention—two Brits and a Swiss-Croatian—chose German to denote their rule in 1956 says something about the preeminence of the continental language in chemistry. “When I was young,” Alain-Jacques Valleron of the French Academy of Sciences told me, “all the good students would learn German.”

But no language has had as far a reach in science as English in the modern day. In part, this is thanks to victories in two world wars. As Michael Gordin, the author of a forthcoming book on scientific language, observed in a recent interview with PRI, “In 1915, Americans were teaching foreign languages and learning foreign languages about the same level as Europeans were.”* But by the 1920s, the zeitgeist was staunchly isolationist: German was criminalized in 23 states. De-emphasizing foreign language learning meant that a generation of American scientists grew up with little exposure to other languages. And scientists fleeing wars in Europe immigrated to the United States and started speaking English. Meanwhile, research activity in the United States surged. The National Science Foundation calculates that 293 Americans graduated with a research doctorate in 1902. By the 1990s, the country produced more than 30,000 new science Ph.D.s a year. More than a million new American researchers in the 20th century, almost all writing and publishing in English, have helped to make it the undisputable lingua franca.

Yet only 5 percent of people worldwide are native English speakers today, so thousands of scientists must now struggle to learn it. Students wrestle with mastering a new language as well as new subject material. “It is hard to get things right, to put down the right words,” Minxuan He, a graduate student in psychology at Berkeley, told me. “Often I will write down a sentence thinking it means exactly what I want to say, but then find out that the words don’t actually mean what I think,” she says. Her thoughts will be fluid and coherent when she conceives of them in her native Chinese. But they suddenly feel as if their logic is lost once translated into English. It is hard to convey original thought, because so much effort must first be put into learning how to translate every idea. Though many scientists can write fluently and with accuracy, Valleron says, they find themselves limited by more stammering spoken English. And it is “hard to express nuance,” whether in writing or in speech.

Perhaps this is an age-old struggle. Did founders of the Académie des Sciences, the ancestor of the French Academy of Sciences created under Louis XIV, excuse poor French from non-Francophone colleagues? Galileo is said to be the first European scientist to write in his native Italian. Was anything ever lost when translators rendered his papers into Latin? There are nods today to the need to judge works only by their scientific quality, not by how they are written. “When possible, reviewers and editors of manuscripts should look beyond errors in grammar, syntax, and usage, and evaluate the science,” urges a 2012 editorial in Molecular Biology of the Cell, an American journal.

Subtle things do get lost, now as they must have done in the past. Chinese scientists discussing the electrical conductivity of copper nanotubes in a 2007 Royal Society of Chemistry paper, for example, chose a rather unfortunate acronym for the subject of their study. (It rhymes with “runt.”) The acronym has stuck: A new study from this year in Science China, an English-language journal, uses the shorthand—innocuous to people who don’t know English slang and amusing for culturally immersed Anglophones, but hardly helpful for scientists wishing to be taken seriously.

English-speaking scientists should exhibit a bit more sympathy and patience toward their peers abroad. Most make little effort to learn another language, even if it is a requirement for foreign colleagues. Those who do know another language tend to revert back to English in casual discourse. “They do not want to do the painful job of trying to express an idea in a foreign language,” Valleron laments, as French, Chinese, or Russian scientists must do.

Original article published here: Slate

Learning second language ‘slows brain ageing’

Languages

Learning a second language could improve reading and intelligence skills
Learning a second language can have a positive effect on the brain, even if it is taken up in adulthood, a University of Edinburgh study suggests.

Researchers found that reading, verbal fluency and intelligence were improved in a study of 262 people tested either aged 11 or in their seventies.

A previous study suggested that being bilingual could delay the onset of dementia by several years.

The study is published in Annals of Neurology.

The big question in this study was whether learning a new language improved cognitive functions or whether individuals with better cognitive abilities were more likely to become bilingual.

Dr Thomas Bak, from the Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, said he believed he had found the answer.

Using data from intelligence tests on 262 Edinburgh-born individuals at the age of 11, the study looked at how their cognitive abilities had changed when they were tested again in their seventies.

The research was conducted between 2008 and 2010.

All participants said they were able to communicate in at least one language other than English.

Of that group, 195 learned the second language before the age of 18, and 65 learned it after that time.

Strong effects

The findings indicate that those who spoke two or more languages had significantly better cognitive abilities compared to what would have been expected from their baseline test.

The strongest effects were seen in general intelligence and reading.

The effects were present in those who learned their second language early, as well as later in life.

Dr Bak said the pattern they found was “meaningful” and the improvements in attention, focus and fluency could not be explained by original intelligence.

“These findings are of considerable practical relevance. Millions of people around the world acquire their second language later in life. Our study shows that bilingualism, even when acquired in adulthood, may benefit the aging brain.”

But he admitted that the study also raised many questions, such as whether learning more than one language could also have the same positive effect on cognitive ageing and whether actively speaking a second language is better than just knowing how to speak it.

Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, US, said: “The epidemiological study provides an important first step in understanding the impact of learning a second language and the ageing brain.

“This research paves the way for future causal studies of bilingualism and cognitive decline prevention.”

Original article published here: bbc.com