A few years ago, Nature published an article on the language barrier in research. Sanberg, Borlongan, and Nishino (1996) recounted the scientific community's reluctance to acknowledge Eiji Osawa's 1970 prediction of the existence of the C60 (buckminsterfullerene) molecule, whose discovery 15 years later earned Kroto et al. the Nobel prize. Osawa had published his discovery in a Japanese publication; as a result, the group that ultimately earned the highest scientific honor for the finding was unaware of his work. This is arguably an extreme example of how the publishing of significant results in a language other than English, the lingua franca of science since the 1940s, may have severe effects on the persons and groups involved.
Over the issue of priority acknowledgment by the scientific community, however, lies the considerably larger (and for many, more urgent) issue of English as a second language. If the membership list of the lAD is reflective of the profession, around sixty percent of practicing astronomers are non-anglophone.
Why not allow scientists to talk and write in their native languages? Do not interpreters and translators exist to handle such situations? There are insufficient finances available to pay the interpreters and translators. In such well-funded fields as pharmaceutics, where most research is industrially based, it may make sense to give simultaneous interpretation at international conferences, but English is the worldwide language of written communication in medical research as well.
Practically speaking, national languages are today confined mostly inside national boundaries. As long as scholars find it appealing to write in journals written in English, the linguistic center of gravity will remain anglophone. In astronomy, The Astrophysical Journal and The Astronomical Journal are indisputably the most prominent astronomical research publications, whilst Nature and Science are reserved for showpiece papers from all fields. Astronomers, like their peers in other fields, are required to learn to write and speak English if they want their work to be recognized internationally. Therefore, for a more in-depth study of the language, you can study with an English online tutor. On the Internet you can find many educational platforms, one of which is LiveXP.
In the field of worldwide scientific publishing, American and British English predominate. The division roughly parallels the conventional publication map of the world, with British English dominating a huge portion of the globe. The greatest number of English speakers, however, resides in the United States, making American English the most widely spoken language in terms of pure numbers. European English-language publishers (such as Kluwer Academic Publishers) predominantly utilize British English. Does diglossia exist (defined as the existence of two versions of the same language spoken within the same community) in English-language publishing? Many appear to believe this, and it is true with regard to informal writing, but this is not the case with regard to academic publication.
There is substantial convergence between the many varieties of English in the upper registers. When a journal requests British or American English, they are requesting British or American spelling and punctuation, with little or no attention for grammatical and idiomatic differences between the two varieties.
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