English, The Language of Science

 

Last week, the Spanish newspaper El País, published an article where you can read that 95% of the scientific articles were written in English and only 1% of them were published either in Spanish or Portuguese. This is based in data from 2020 and added that 84% of the Iberoamerican researchers published their papers in English. We can see that a small group of scholars in Spanish speaking countries actually wrote in Spanish, and an even smaller percentage of researchers from Brazil and Portugal wrote in Portuguese.  

This is not new. In Google you can find similar articles written in recent years about the same topic. Similar situations repeat with other languages such as French, German or Russian.

In the past, the language of Education was Latin. It is believed that the first scientist who wrote a scientific article in his mother tongue was Galileo Galilei, who in 1612, wrote an article in Italian about sunspots. Other people followed his example and from the 18^th century, languages like English, French and German were used more than Latin when writing about scientific findings. After the World War I, the importance of English and German increased while French decreased. The USA emerged as a new superpower in the scientific world. But German language suffered from a boicot against scientists who spoke that language, and later on, from the disastrous policies of the nazi regime. At the end, hundreds of German scientists emigrated to the US and then English became the most important language in the post war academy. 

Back to the article, they mention some possible reasons why in Ibero-America they prefer to write in English, instead of in Spanish or Portuguese. In brief, the reasons given are: First, Status. People think that publishing in English give more prestige to the research. Second, the quality of published works is measured in terms of number of citations made, and generally speaking, journals in English are the most cited. And third, the policies of international publishing companies that privilege English. They added the monolingualism in the USA, that makes compulsory to write in English if we want our articles to be read in that country.

In my opinion, there are many other factors that favours English as the main language of Science. Scientific publications are important but they are not the only column that supports the hegemony of the language. Lets see some of them.

University rankings are very important because they give us an idea on how each institution is seen globally. Many researchers of prestige work in Universities, and the more prestige of an institution the more appreciation for their research works. According to QS world ranking, among the top ten universities in the world we have 5 from the USA, 4 from the UK and one from Switzerland. Total number of universities form English speaking countries: 9. from Switzerland we have the EHT of Zurich, where lectures are in German. But post-degree courses are conducted in English. If we widen the list to the top 50, we have 38 from English speaking countries, 18 from the US. There are 5 universities from the PR of China. In the position 69 we have Universidad de Buenos Aires, the only one from a Spanish speaking country among the top 100, and there are none from Portuguese speaking countries. 

In the Times higher education ranking, we have similar results. Among the top ten universities we have 8 from the US and 2 from the UK. If we widen this ranking to the top 50, we have 39 universities from English speaking countries. It is possible that among the rest of them, lectures in some subjects are probably in English as well. There are none Iberoamerican universities among the top 100. 

In the Shanghai Ranking, published in China, there are also 8 universities from the US and 2 from Britain among the top ten. If we widen the ranking to the top 50, 40 of them come from English speaking countries. There are none from Spanish or Portuguese speaking countries among the top 100.

The OECD organizes the PISA test to evaluate the performance of educational systems in 15-years-old students. The most recent results talk about how well students from countries such as China, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea performed in mathematics and science. Canada is the best positioned English speaking country in the last results, followed by the UK, New Zealand and Australia. The US made a good job in science but did not do so well in math. Many countries who were among the best in the last test very often use English in their classrooms. From Ibero-America Portugal did well, then Spain came some places below, although did better than the US in Math. Chile and Uruguay got the best results in our continent, but were not as good as the worst results in the European Union. 

I can understand the frustration we have with the scientific journals, but I can also see that our educational systems are not helping either.

The number of Nobel Prize laureates is a modern way of evaluating the capacity of each country to train outstanding researchers. It is a point used to assess the position that any University has in the world ranking and in fact it is a bonus point to its image if there is a Nobel Prize laureate among its staff of researchers, professors or alumni. It is interesting to know that those who have been recipients of the Nobel Prize can recommend other people to be nominated. Universities have the ability to nominate candidates to be awarded the Nobel prize (By the way, members of National Parliaments can nominate candidates too, it is just that they do not always do so)

The United States is the country that leads in Nobel Prizes. If we just talk about the categories of Medicine, Physics and Chemistry, we have that as of 2020, The US had had 102 Nobel prize winners in Medicine, 95 in Physics and 72 in Chemistry. Great Britain had 31 laureates in Medicine, 25 in physics and 33 in Chemistry. Among Iberoamericans we have 5 winners in Medicine (2 from Spain, 2 from Argentina y one from Portugal), 2 in Chemistry (One from Argentina and the other one is from Mexico) and none in Physics. Among the 7 laureates in this list, we can add that 2 of them were nominated while they were living in the US as American citizens and one more was nominated while living in the UK and being already a British citizen.

Number of patent grants is another way to evaluate how innovative is a country. A patent is a right granted for an invention. Inventors disclose technical details of their inventions, preventing at the same time that other people exploit commercially this invention without the consent of the creator. It is at the same time a protection granted by the law and at the end it is a way that guaranties that someone can profit from their own invention, whether inventors want to put their creation in practice or hand over them to someone else in exchange of financial compensation. According to data from last year, USA was the second country in the world in number of registered patents, with 354.430 (China came in first place). Other countries with outstanding positions in terms of number of registered patents were Japan, Canada (22.009), South Korea and Australia (who granted 17.010 patents). Then we have Brazil in the 12th position with 10.947, and Mexico in the 14th position (8.702). 

Regarding support and sponsorship of private companies, it is a good idea to rely on alternative sources of support and not depend only on a government or a staff of bureaucrats. In this article, they mention and I quote: “Ibero-American countries have fallen into the trap of Anglo private industries”. I ask: where are the Ibero-American private companies? And the local financial institutions? If we cannot trust them, then we have to rely on those who want to assist our business.

Finally, the article proposes that artificial intelligence and automatic translation should help make science available to everybody regardless the language it was written in. In my opinion, just translate the articles will not solve any problem if first they do not solve those issues that made Iberoamerican academies less competitive. Neither the position of those universities in the world rankings nor the support from local industries will improve just translating scientific articles. It is not going to help increasing the number of patents registered as they are registered locally. Rather than that, the use of translation will be likely an exit door for local researchers who will leave to other places where they work is much more appreciated.

I personally do not believe that English will always be the Lingua Franca of Science. But I do not think that it will share its hegemony with Spanish or Portuguese. But I see there is a language that eventually could share the position of English as language of the science: Mandarin (Chinese). The quality if scientific research and the position of the universities and research institutes from China has been improving in the international rankings. China depends on an increasingly strong industry and financial institutions, so local researchers do not need to go far to find the support they need.

Today, 95% of the scientific articles are written in English. As off 2050, it is possible that we will have to chose whether to publish in English and/or in Chinese.