How Could International Scientific Communication Be Made Fairer and More Efficient?

I) One aspect of globalization is the emergence of one single global lingua franca of science, English. It has advantages for all scientists as well as for mankind as a whole in that it enhances international scientific cooperation and thus accelerates scientific progress.

II) The preference for the global lingua franca is stronger in the pure or theoretical sciences than in the applied sciences or especially the humanities.

III) Scientists are forced to use the global lingua franca if they want to follow new scientific developments or make their own contributions known internationally.

IV) The global lingua franca of science (and also of other fields) is the native tongue of a minority, the Anglophones, and a foreign tongue for the majority of the global scientific community. This entails various notable asymmetries.

V) One of these asymmetries is the Anglophone-centered flow of information, since Anglophones communicate almost exclusively in English and Non-Anglophones in English plus their own language, but much less in other languages.

VI) Another asymmetry is the vast advantage the Anglophones enjoy over the non-Anglophones in that they have to invest less in language learning and text production in the global lingua franca, but are still able to produce linguistically more refined texts with a superior impact on recipients. They also have to do less translating than non-Anglophone scientists in communicating with laymen and practitioners in their own society, e.g. in medicine. Non-Anglophones may even be handicapped cognitively in struggling with a foreign language or be psychologically strained because they feel, at least to some extent, isolated from their own society.

VII) It seems likely that the Anglophones' linguistic advantages carry over (to a so-far unknown extent) to various other advantages in scientific competition. These are most likely one factor, among others, which enhances
- Anglophone scientists' more frequent functioning as the gatekeepers (editors, reviewers etc.) of scientific publications (journals, conferences),
- Anglophone scientists' superior reputation,
- Their academic institutions' superior reputation,
- Their institutions' attracting the lion's share of internationally mobile scientists and students together with their academic and financial contributions (tuition fees and other spending),
- Anglophone scientific publishers' greater success as well as
- Anglophone countries' other economic and non-economic benefits which derive from competitive advantages in scientific communication.

VIII) The prominence of English in scientific communication further enhances the language's use value and prestige and individuals' motivation to study it, thus also stabilizing its function as the global lingua franca beyond science. The expansion of the global functions of English further increases the Anglophone individuals' and countries' linguistic advantages and derivative benefits.

IX) There seems to be a growing awareness not only among non-Anglophones, but also among Anglophones, of the non-Anglophones' linguistic disadvantages in scientific communication and a growing readiness, in principle, to work towards greater fairness (see, e.g., Benfield 2006; Flowerdew in print).

X) The explanation of how the present situation has evolved can largely be guessed from history and from fairly common knowledge. Roughly speaking, the three languages English, French and German were of similar importance for scientific communication at the beginning of the 20th century, with their countries forming the three main centers of science. As a consequence of WW I, Nazism, WW II, and the Soviet Union and its fall, the US rose to the position of the leading world power and the most prominent center of science and English, the global language of science. The rise of English was enhanced by more specific accompanying processes like the development of the most representative bibliographical data bases (e.g. Biological Abstracts, Chemical Abstracts, etc.) or the Citation Indices and by halo effects such as the extension of the prestige of the global scientific center to its language and vice versa (cf. Ammon 1998: 179-204).

XI) There is resentment against the Anglophones' communicative advantages among non-Anglophones, especially among those whose languages have until recently also had considerable international standing and lost it (cf. e.g. Durand 2001). Such resentment is sometimes expressed in criticism like that, for example, of the "American linguistic imperialism". Though there can be no doubt that the rise of English to its present standing has been in the Anglophones' best interest and been promoted by their countries, such criticism should be aware of the following circumstances:
- Most countries have tried or still try to spread their own language and would presumably have no qualms if it had become the global language of science.
- The effects of language promotion as such are usually quite limited. Thus France, for example, has been at least as eager as the Anglophone countries to spread its language, but been less successful. It has lacked the resources and the promises, including science, which language promotion needs to succeed.

XII) It now seems to be of primary importance to focus on the present situation and its shortcomings and to ask for possibilities for improvement. The search for improvements should be guided by the questions whether and in which respect the present language situation hampers the development of science and which solutions could guarantee more efficiency and fairness in global scientific cooperation.