Levelling the lingo playing field.

Abstract

With an ever‐declining number of papers written in languages other than English, the idiom of Shakespeare is, today more than ever before, the international language of science [1], [2]. In 2014, according to PubMed's language filter, 95.4% of life science publications retrieved by the search engine were written in English, in line with the trend of the last several decades [1], [2]. Today, among the 20 countries with the highest number of publications per year on PubMed, only France and China apparently publish less than 95% of their papers in English [1]. However, English is only natively spoken by around 5% of the world population and only about 20 countries use it as their primary language (http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size). Not surprisingly, in 2014, only 4 out of the 20 countries with highest number of life science publications have English as their primary language [3], and in the 5‐year period 2008–2012, nearly 54% of papers on PubMed were written in countries where English is not the primary idiom [1]. So, is it wise to keep English as the language of science? According to Howy Jacobs's 2012 editorial [4], the answer is yes. Jacobs argues that, because English is the language used to publish the vast majority of scientific articles today, it must be considered and protected as the language of science. His stance, he says, is not imperialistic—his native language is English—because he would willingly replace English should “a majority of the world's scientists” vote for it. …