'Scientific Babel: The Language of Science' by Michael Gordin

In 1974, Psychologische Forschung, a renowned German journal, renamed itself Psychological Research and asked contributors to submit papers in English. If they insisted on writing in German or French, they should provide an English title and summary.

Considering how much research was once written in German, this was a signal change. After jostling with rival languages for centuries, English was now science's ruling tongue.

Michael Gordin recounts the ascent of English in science with verve, but throughout this impressive book a question lurks. English is now the dominant language in many other fields, from business to sport. What is so special about science?

Part of the answer is that it is Gordin's field: he is a Princeton history professor who specialises in science history. But he argues that language in science is particularly important. Because scientists build on one another's findings, mutual comprehension becomes essential. As a result, science "has been anglophone longer and more completely than any other domain".

He could have added another justification for studying the rise of English through a scientific lens: the story of language and science has been particularly wracked by history's great events, from the jostling for national dominance in Europe to the rise and defeat of Nazism and the cold war.

Gordin is honest about his book's American-European focus. While he gives space to other scientific languages, including Arabic, Sanskrit and Chinese, he says: "I cannot write a history from sources I cannot read and understand."

He can understand an impressive range of languages - English, French, German, Russian, Latin and Esperanto - but his principal focus is the triumvirate of languages that dominated after Latin's shrivelling.

English, German and French were the languages that a 19th or early 20th century scientist needed. Not all managed to learn them. Austrian physicist Leopold Pfaundler wrote in 1910 that, while every scholar should have mastered the three languages, "for the majority of German scholars and men of science this may hold good, but in the case of the French it is less true, and in the case of the English least of all". Even then, Pfaundler wrote, the triumvirate was not enough. There were also scientists writing in Italian, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Czech and other languages. Science was thriving but was being conducted in too many languages for people to keep up. There had to be a solution to this scientific Babel.

To many, the answer was a specially constructed language. "Today most people who are not Esperantists consider it, frankly, borderline ridiculous," Gordin writes. He does not. His recounting of those who took Esperanto seriously is sympathetic.

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In 1913, 72 per cent of Californian high schools taught German. Descendants of German immigrants spoke it in the Midwest. But when the US entered the first world war, there was a fierce reaction against German. Cities banned it. One Ohio council fined people $25 for speaking it.

With the rise of the Nazis, many of the Jewish and dissident professors who were thrown out of Germany ended up in English-speaking countries, shifting the balance of power. Even after the war, the rise of English did not seem inevitable. When the Soviet Union triggered the space race with Sputnik's launch in 1957, Americans worried that the future of science was at least partly Russian.

But communism's collapse and the triumph of English-speaking, and particularly American, technology left scientists everywhere in little doubt of what language they needed to learn.

It was a triumph for English and for science; but, as a linguist, Gordin understands how alienating many non-native English speakers find working in a tongue that is not their own - particularly when their anglophone counterparts "have given up all pretence of learning foreign languages".

The writer is an FT columnist

Scientific Babel: The Language of Science from the Fall of Latin to the Rise of English, by Michael Gordin, Publisher (Profile Books, £25)

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