TY - JOUR
T1 - Focus
T2 - Linguistic hegemony and the history of science: Introduction: Hegemonic languages and science
AU - Gordin, Michael D.
N1 - Funding Information:
Maintenance is more straightforward. Once there is a hegemonic language of publication in English, the desire of researchers to be read and cited usually decides the question. Governments and universities have adopted bibliometric indicators such as impact factors and citation counts that reinforce the hierarchy of journals—themselves increasingly aggregated by the relatively few publishers that constitute an oligopoly—further increasing the costs of defecting to another tongue. As research funding has become, with the end of the Cold War, significantly transnational, multinational organizations like the European Science Foundation and even national competitions like Germany’s Exzellenzinitiativen demand applications in English to facilitate international peer review.13 The interconnection of Global English and today’s scientific infrastructure is extremely tight.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 by The History of Science Society.
PY - 2017/9
Y1 - 2017/9
N2 - Science has historically been a multilingual enterprise, yet the present day appears to belie this generalization. It is difficult to deny the observation that the natural sciences today have converged to a state where a particular form of English-variously termed “Global English,” “International English,” or “English as a Lingua Franca”- serves as the almost universal language of interaction among scientific practitioners. The history of science demonstrates that many other languages have served (and, in many contexts, still do) for scientific and scholarly interchange. The unusual feature about the past several decades is not that the dominant language of the natural sciences is English (as opposed to, say, German or Russian or Chinese) but that it is a single language. This Focus section seeks to open up avenues of inquiry that would put both the past and the present of science into conversation, along this axis of translation and hegemonic languages. In addition to outlining the contributions-which explore the cases of Arabic, Chinese, Latin, French, and Russian over a millennium-this introduction addresses the charged question of English.
AB - Science has historically been a multilingual enterprise, yet the present day appears to belie this generalization. It is difficult to deny the observation that the natural sciences today have converged to a state where a particular form of English-variously termed “Global English,” “International English,” or “English as a Lingua Franca”- serves as the almost universal language of interaction among scientific practitioners. The history of science demonstrates that many other languages have served (and, in many contexts, still do) for scientific and scholarly interchange. The unusual feature about the past several decades is not that the dominant language of the natural sciences is English (as opposed to, say, German or Russian or Chinese) but that it is a single language. This Focus section seeks to open up avenues of inquiry that would put both the past and the present of science into conversation, along this axis of translation and hegemonic languages. In addition to outlining the contributions-which explore the cases of Arabic, Chinese, Latin, French, and Russian over a millennium-this introduction addresses the charged question of English.
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U2 - 10.1086/694164
DO - 10.1086/694164
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85029675808
SN - 0021-1753
VL - 108
SP - 606
EP - 611
JO - Isis
JF - Isis
IS - 3
ER -