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Science's Lingua Franca
While many rural languages are going extinct, new urban hybrid languages may help to maintain global diversity. Hundreds of new forms of English have already been spawned around the world.
Some traditional languages are losing their practical use as much communication—economic, cultural, and political—becomes international. "Swedish, like many European languages, is now more a local language of solidarity than one for science, university education, or European communication,"
Scott Montgomery- a Seattle-based geologist and author of The Chicago Guide to Communication Science—shows that English has established itself as the preferred world language for science.
"Because of its scale and dynamism, science has become the most active and dynamic creator of new language in the world today. And most of this creation is occurring in English, the lingua franca of scientific effort," Montgomery said.
Montgomery believes the future will almost certainly see a continued expansion of English use in science, especially in international settings, though not to the final exclusion of other tongues. Already, more than 90 percent of journal literature in some scientific fields is printed in English.
"More and more scientists who are non-native speakers of English will need to become multilingual," Montgomery said. " This constitutes an educational burden in some sense, but one that has much historical precedent in the cases of ancient Greek, medieval Latin, and medieval Arabic."
