Does Science Need a Global Language?: English and the Future of Research - Rilegato

Montgomery, Scott L.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0226535037 ISBN 13: 9780226535036

Casa editrice: Univ of Chicago Pr, 2013

Riassunto

In early 2012, the global scientific community erupted with news that the elusive Higgs boson had likely been found, providing potent validation for the Standard Model of how the universe works. Scientists from more than one hundred countries contributed to this discovery—proving, beyond any doubt, that a new era in science had arrived, an era of multinationalism and cooperative reach. Globalization, the Internet, and digital technology all play a role in making this new era possible, but something more fundamental is also at work. In all scientific endeavors lies the ancient drive for sharing ideas and knowledge, and now this can be accomplished in a single tongue— English. But is this a good thing?

In Does Science Need a Global Language?, Scott L. Montgomery seeks to answer this question by investigating the phenomenon of global English in science, how and why it came about, the forms in which it appears, what advantages and disadvantages it brings, and what its future might be. He also examines the consequences of a global tongue, considering especially emerging and developing nations, where research is still at a relatively early stage and English is not yet firmly established.

Throughout the book, he includes important insights from a broad range of perspectives in linguistics, history, education, geopolitics, and more. Each chapter includes striking and revealing anecdotes from the front-line experiences of today’s scientists, some of whom have struggled with the reality of global scientific English. He explores topics such as student mobility, publication trends, world Englishes, language endangerment, and second language learning, among many others. What he uncovers will challenge readers to rethink their assumptions about the direction of contemporary science, as well as its future. 

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Scott L. Montgomery is a consulting geologist and university lecturer. He is the author of The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science, The Powers That Be: Global Energy for the Twenty-First Century and Beyond, and several books on the history of science and scientific language, including Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures and Time.

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DOES SCIENCE NEED A GLOBAL LANGUAGE?

English and the Future of Research

By Scott L. Montgomery

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Scott L. Montgomery
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-53503-6

Contents

Foreword by David Crystal..................................................
ix
Preface....................................................................
xi
(1) A New Era..............................................................
1
(2) Global English Realities, Geopolitics, Issues.........................
24
(3) English and Science The Current Landscape.............................
68
(4) Impacts A Discussion of Limitations and Issues for a Global Language..
102
(5) Past and Future What Do Former Lingua Francas of Science Tell Us?.....
132
(6) Does Science Need a Global Language?...................................
166
Notes......................................................................
189
Index......................................................................
215

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

A New Era

To peep at such a world—to see the stirOf the great Babel ...

WILLIAM COWPER, "The Task"

When I first met Ben, I thought he must be in customer service, so friendlyand practiced was his smile. In fact, he is a biochemist from Uganda.Very dark-skinned and always neatly dressed with a touch of elegance,he speaks fluent and natural English that bubbles with an East Africanaccent. His eyes have a sharp intelligence that can penetrate solid objects.We were forced colleagues, our boys playing on the same sports team,and so I decided to ask how he became a chemist. Every researcher hasa story; his was something more.

"I am lucky to be a scientist," Ben began, "but my luck was no accident."Born in 1958, four years before Uganda's independence from Britain,Ben spent his early years near Mubende, a town northwest of Kampala,where Bantu is spoken. He attended a local district school like most otherchildren and was taught English. His father had worked in the colonialbureaucracy and often spoke the language at home with his son. "He hadhigh hopes for me," Ben said, without further explanation. "He savedenough to send me to a private academy, where a British man taught."This man, an expatriate engineer of Indian descent, quickly recognizedin Ben an aptitude for math. With the father's permission, he gave theboy private lessons and much encouragement. "He was a mentor," Bennoted, "and a lifeline."

In 1972, the new dictator, Idi Amin, ordered all Asians to leave thecountry within ninety days. The teacher was forced to flee and never returned.In the face of mounting chaos and murders caused by the regime,Ben's father sent his son to an uncle in Tanzania and then, with help fromother family members, to San Francisco, where a relative owned a smallrestaurant. Ben was granted refugee status and attended school whileworking part time in the restaurant; since his English was both excellentand polite, he helped conduct business with suppliers. With his earnings,he eventually enrolled in a community college. Ben's parents toldhim he must remain in the United States, so he eventually transferred tothe University of Oregon, where a scholarship helped him earn a BS inmathematics and an MS in biochemistry. Chemistry drew him, he said,because of its powers of transformation. "I know this is the ancient view,of the alchemists. But it is true; in chemistry I found a kind of hope."He studied the biochemistry of plants for his PhD, then took a job witha firm in Chicago.

Since 1990, Ben has specialized in food-related research. When I askedwhy, he replied, "Because this is what the world needs most." He has hadprofessional assignments in Brazil, India, Japan, Norway, and elsewhere,and has presented papers at many scientific meetings. He enjoys thesemeetings a great deal and attends several every year, as he almost alwayscomes away with new research ideas and collaborations. Yet he said hehad been thinking about returning to Uganda to teach. When I expressedsurprise at this desire to end a successful career, he looked at me withoutsmiling. "I feel science must be shared," he said. "It is not mine to keep.I can speak to my countrymen in a language that will not take sides withany group."

Science, Globally Speaking

In a globalizing world, language is power. The more human beings andinstitutions with which we can communicate, the more access to the offeringsand agents of the larger world we gain. This may seem merely amatter of numbers, but far more is involved. Language has a role in theoldest dream for a better world: the dream of a universal language thatallows people everywhere to commune and work together. It is the visionof a unified humanity, harmony on a planetary scale. In the West, we knowthis dream through the image of its loss: the biblical story of the Tower ofBabel, a great structure erected to reach the heavens, designed no doubtby engineers and scientists of the time, but left incomplete when a jealousGod shattered the once-universal language into thousands of tongues thatcould not understand one another.

What if, after a significant pause, a new chapter and verse might beadded to the tale? What if, in our own time, a worthy alternative to Babelhas emerged, lacking in arrogance, extending not merely to the empyrealrealm but deep into the atom and as far as the distant galaxies? Such questionshave already been answered. For the first time in history, science—humanity'sgreat tower of knowledge—has a global tongue. In truth, itis a global language for numerous domains, with science being one caseamong many. It is a special case, to be sure, but one whose meaning can'tbe probed without an understanding of this larger reality.

Today, close to 2 billion people in over 120 nations speak English atsome level of proficiency. This extraordinary number includes a broadspectrum of ability, without any doubt. Yet it testifies to the global drawthis language now commands. For the natural sciences, medicine, andlarge areas of engineering, English utterly dominates in internationalcommunication. This does not mean that it rules in every circumstance, inevery country. Its dominance has definite limits, being confined mainly tosituations with an international or, especially, a global dimension. Yet thisis crucial, as we will see, since science has itself entered a new, globalizingera. English, in short, is the global tongue for this era of globalization.

By the late 2000s, nearly all forms of written output, whether in printor online, whether in person or in video, whether in professional or informalsettings, had already come to depend on this one tongue whenthe intended audience is the larger world community of researchers inany field. Scientists everywhere now recognize this. They would find itnecessary to also stress that the global role of this language isn't at allconfined to publication. English has become the speech of internationalscientific conferences, symposia, conventions, colloquia, visiting lectures,workshops, interviews, and more—the oral dimension to global science.When Ben goes to Brazil or Japan to give a three-week minicourse onprotein synthesis in dwarf wheat, or when he is hired as a consultant bya German agricultural firm to examine its operations in Southeast Asia,he speaks English. As he explained, this isn't an accommodation by hisclients but a requirement, a company policy. "I would not be hired forthese jobs unless I spoke it," he said.

Corporate scientific exchanges, whether between European and Africanfirms or among Asian companies from different countries, also relyon English. Indeed, private sector science led by multinational firms thatinvest in research and development (R&D), training, and new facilitiesdepend on this language. International patents are now overwhelminglyfiled in English. Online postings of research jobs, postdoctoral fellowships,new databases and other resources, and international grants allnow employ English as well.

Then there is scientific information itself. Websites of major researchinstitutes, organizations, and statistical and data archives around theglobe—core repositories of contemporary technical knowledge—haveturned to English. A tiny sampling of these might include CERN (ConseilEuropéen pour la Recherche Nucléaire; now European Organization forNuclear Research), PubMed (largest archive worldwide for the biomedicaland life sciences), ChemWeb (for chemistry), GeoRef (for earth sciences),ENCODE (data from the human genome sequence), OBIS (OceanBiogeographic Information System), arXiv (preprint archive for physics,mathematics, and other fields), the Max Planck Institute, the EuropeanScience Foundation, the United Nations Statistical Databases, and theglobal Census of Marine Life. For Internet science in general, we needonly use a term such as natrium (the Dutch word for "sodium") or RNA asa search word to witness the paucity of sites retrieved that appear in anylanguage other than English. Of course, Internet search engines captureonly what has been most often used—but that's exactly the point.

Will science conducted in other languages die out before long? Notat all. Throughout the world, many thousands of technical journals arepublished in Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, French, Spanish,Korean, Arabic, and so on. Despite the growth in the use of Englishin scientific endeavors, there is little likelihood that domestic science—fortifiedby the demands of competitive nationalism and realpolitik—willgo away any time soon. Governments fund science less for love of truththan for economic competitiveness, defense, prestige, public health. Ifsuch aims remain firm, and if scientific work looks to the embrace ofgovernment support in its homeland, a healthy national literature willcontinue. In a few countries where English is close to being a secondlanguage (Scandinavia, for example), it is true that the native tongues aremuch less used even in domestic scientific communication. On the otherhand, in other regions, such as Latin America, the domestic tongue is alsoa world language. Thus, if English seems an overwhelming force in someplaces, it is much less so in others. By no measure does it command a truehegemony. Again, its realm has limits. Where it remains unrivaled is inscience's expanding global dimension: the greater internationalization ofnew knowledge and its creation.

At first blush, a new linguistic competitor does seem to have emerged.Mandarin Chinese, with roughly 900 million users and backed by China'sown spectacular economic rise, is felt by many to be capable of replacingEnglish in science and elsewhere over the next several decades orso. Between 1999 and 2009, the annual number of scientific publicationsthat included one or more Chinese authors increased from less than30,000 to nearly 120,000 in international journals—a fourfold leap in asingle decade (by comparison, US output grew only 30%, from 265,000 to340,000). Furthermore, it has become common to hear Chinese spokenin the hallways of science and engineering graduate departments all acrossthe United States. There are numbers to back this up: by 2009, foreignstudents, especially those from China and India, earned no less than 33%of all doctoral degrees granted by US institutions in the sciences and 57%in engineering. Such are figures to give one pause.

But to think that they reveal a new tide of favor for the Chinese languageover English would be naïve. Impressive as the publication statistics surelyare, what they show is the success of Chinese researchers in English—thelanguage of international journals in science—not Mandarin. Thespeed with which Chinese representation has risen in measured publicationsreflects directly how rapidly English has been accepted by Chinesescientists as dominant in the global context. As for Chinese students inAmerica, it would be an error to think of them as "agents" working onbehalf of their native tongue. Even the most informal survey will showthat their goals include gaining a higher level of scientific training andimproved English-language skills, not least a stronger ability to write andpublish in this language. By far the largest source of funding for thesestudents are their own families, not the government (they are not linguisticinfiltrators!). Ask them the language in which they wish to publishtheir research, and you will find a single answer. "If we want a researchjob here or in Europe, or in an international company, or even a highlevel job back in China, too, we must publish in English," a physics PhDcandidate told me recently. "China's best scientists do this. They wantinternational audiences, and this means English." Recognizing this truth,most of China's top research journals—over two hundred by 2010—arethemselves changing to English-only publication. Most major researchinstitutions in China, not least the Chinese Academy of Sciences, nowhave versions of their websites, journals, papers, and databases in English.Dozens of major Chinese universities offer science and engineeringcourses in English, to both foreign and Chinese students. One would behard pressed to find even a single institution in North America or Europefollowing this course for Chinese. Meanwhile, English-language coursesin the sciences now appear in the curricula of universities worldwide,from Finland to Korea.

We can approach this phenomenon from a different angle. It is estimatedthat over 1.5 billion people worldwide, including schoolchildren, arelearning English to varying degrees, while about 30 million to 40 millioncan be counted as studying Mandarin, with a far smaller number (in thelow thousands) learning Cantonese and other Chinese languages. Thus,the number of Chinese learners would need to grow by about forty timesto compete with English at a significant level. According to a speechgiven by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao in 2009, more than 300 million ofhis countrymen were studying English that year, compared with about50,000 Americans learning Chinese. This figure for Chinese learners ofEnglish is likely exaggerated; yet common estimates by those less engagedin political speech making begin at 100 million to 180 million and go upfrom there. Then there is the fact that English has become a requiredsubject in Chinese schools starting in grade 3; only 4% of US middle andhigh schools were even offering Mandarin as a choice by 2008–9, whenthe news media spoke of a "great surge" in interest for this language.An important work on the status of English in China published in 2009made the overall point even more forcefully.

It is clear that English learning is unlike the teaching and learningof other FLs [foreign languages] in ways beyond issues of scale orsize.... China is regarded as an EFL[English as a Foreign Language]country, but the depth of penetration and the variegated rolesassigned to English, the "local reward systems" available throughEnglish, point to levels of domestication more typical of English asa Second Language settings. This implies that English is imaginedto have, and Chinese society has taken steps to bring about, domesticsocial functions for English: English for Chinese purposes in Chinesesettings. In a key, if limited sense, this aims to make English a Chineselanguage.

None of this is to say that the situation is final. Major changes can certainlyoccur during the present century. Yet any such changes would have toreverse a momentum of profound, global extent. Empirically, the dominanceof English in science stands beyond question. From lab to classroom,democracy to autocracy, researchers can and do communicate well in alanguage accepted as a kind of universal currency.

It would be wrong, however, to assume that scientists everywhere possessthis coin, or possess it to the same degree. They do not. And as withany form of capital, uneven possession is widespread and means inequality,with large implications. There are realities that a story like Ben's doesn'tbring to the eye or ear. An international tongue can be a hard master.Those who have it, as Ben did from an early age ("my luck was not anaccident"), may gain opportunity, mobility, and more. But consider theyoung Korean biochemist whose English is poor, who must struggle orpay to get her slides translated for an upcoming meeting, to work on herscript, pronunciation, anxiety. Those who do not possess command of thedominant tongue find themselves limited, confined, even disenfranchised,ignored. Much forced accommodation exists among scientists who do notknow English well. Local tongues and possibly cultures are affected. Alanguage that spreads to many nations is one toward which many millionsof people will migrate, perhaps leaving behind part of their nativelinguistic heritage. Casualties exist, in other words. History (as we willsee in chapter 5) suggests that they may not be avoidable.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from DOES SCIENCE NEED A GLOBAL LANGUAGE? by Scott L. Montgomery. Copyright © 2013 by Scott L. Montgomery. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Univ of Chicago Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0226535037
• ISBN 13: 9780226535036
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 226
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile