Abstract
Let us for a moment imagine that as researchers, we would have no common communication language, no lingua franca for scientific exchange. What would happen? Every one of us would do research and publish it in his/her mother tongue, and perhaps some of us, as it might be the case for long time expatriates – as in my case – would do research work in a second (i.e. additionally acquired) or third language. We would concentrate on national and/or language-group based research and outstanding research contributions in other languages would be perceived only through translations. International conferences from scientific networks and associations, such as EBEN, EURAM or EIASM (to stay in a European context) would still exist but probably be limited to plenary sessions with simultaneous translation in several languages. Workshops and presentations in parallel sessions were abandoned as inefficient and too complicated to organize requiring simultaneous translation in multiple languages. Without a common language, academic communication across language barriers would not be impossible but more complicated, time-consuming, more expensive and based on translations and polyglot researchers. This was the situation in Europe (and the world) in the 19 th and early 20 th century when Latin had ceased to serve as lingua franca for the scientific community. " Scientific Babel " as Gordin entitled his book (Gordin 2015). Research in different disciplines was done in a national context, international conferences were almost inexistent and outstanding research findings, especially in natural sciences, were slowly disseminated through translation and/or polyglot collaborators (see Gordin 2015). Still in the 1920s, more than 40 % of global scientific literature was published in German language, followed by English (around 33 %), French, Russian and Japanese (Hamel 2007). No dominant language existed at that time. We can take this as an indicator that there are no purely linguistic reasons (in terms of preciseness, " easy " grammar structures etc.) for a language to become a scientific lingua franca. Scientific languages are not born, they are made! Since the second half of the 20 th century, the situation has tremendously changed. Through globalization and on-line publishing, the number of scientific publications has massively increased and on top we assist a tsunami of scientific English: regardless the disciplines, over 90 % of current global scientific literature is published in English language. Having a lingua franca for scientific communication comes with several advantages and English will certainly remain the dominant global language for academia for a certain amount of time. However, the rather recent dynamics towards a situation with English as the sole language of scientific publications entails severe disadvantages for the whole scientific community. From a historic perspective, I try to analyze the fundamental dynamics of such processes and to point out what we can possibly conclude and learn from history in order to moderate or even counterbalance negative consequences of an " English-only " hegemony.