Look at this journal edition from 50 years ago. There’s articles in French, German and English. You had to be multilingual to even begin to read the issue! When did this stop being the case? Was Dialectica an anomaly? Are there still journals like this?
Technically, many journals will take articles in French and German, at least, but the practice is dying out. One of the main reasons (or so I was told by a journal rep) is that the Japanese will not subscribe to a journal unless it is entirely (or nearly so) in English. The Japanese make up a a very important part of the market and they will learn one foreign language but not more than one. Russian journals are still largely in Russian, some French journals are mostly in French (and the Comptes Rendus broke a tradition of nearly 200 years recently and began to permit notes in English.
The explanation is simple: authors want to be read and are not interested in these political games. Once upon a time, it was Latin, for a long time, the main language of scientific publication was German (two world wars ended that, particularly the desire of the refugees from Nazi Germany not wanting to publish in that language) and, who knows, one day maybe it will be Chinese. As long as science is an international pursuit, it will be convenient to have a single language that every practitioner shares. The reason English took over was mainly the US pre-eminence in science. As that disappears (and the process is slow, but it is clearly starting–the first symptom may have been abandonment of the Supercollider, but more serious is the recent rise of creationism and young-earth geology, and antiscientism in general) some other language will certainly take over, although it is not yet evident what it will be.
In my field (art history) there are a good number of multilingual journals-- I read a number that publish in English, German, Dutch, and French, since most people in that subdiscipline in the field read all of these fine. In other fields, like religious studies, you can still find journals published in church Latin, et cetera.
I doubt that Chinese (Mandarin) will ever be a lingua franca because the language is tonal when spoken and has thousands more than 26 characters. Or so I am told. Spanish is easy to learn (or so I am told) and widespread.
Celtic Studies is multilingual too: most journals have two main languages (Irish / English, German / English, Welsh / English, French / English… anyone see a pattern?) but a few have a broader range.
My pet peeve is multilingual articles. I’m glad you read Latin and German fluently, but could you pick ONE language to write in? Quote all you like from whatever you like, but translate your quotes, please, as I like to be able to get the highlights with only one dictionary by my side.
ETA: Chinese is already a regional lingua franca. If you speak Arabic as a native language (for instance), there’s nothing inherently harder about learning Chinese than about learning English.
There are many history journals that are multilingual. Most are primarily in one language or another, but usually have some articles in other languages every now and then.
You can’t be serious about that. Creationists and young earth geologists don’t publish in respected academic journals. That part plays no role. Another language may take over in 50 years or 500 years but there is no sign of that yet. You can travel much of the world speaking only English and get by just fine (I have done it myself). That intertia lasts for a long time. For every failed supercollider, there are dozens of counterexamples of crucial scientific breakthroughs done by English speaking scientists and published by their journal editors.
Angewante Chemie is published in both German and English. They accept articles in both languages. As far as I know, the English edition is the same as the German edition. Chemisch Beirisch(sp?) is only published in German and is still quite important for chemistry research.
I dealt with German articles by typing them into Google Translator or equivalent and figuring out what the gobbledygook I got out meant. These translators don’t know what to do with words like “tritrated”.
*Dialectica *is a Swiss journal. Publishing is more than one language wouldn’t be unusual in a country with four official languages.
However, it only publishes in English today.
Since you can search its archives, I’d suggest that the OP go through and answer his own question about when it switched over entirely to English.
I don’t know how is it right now, but the main problem with the “International Edition” of AC used to be the lag: there would be several months between the publication of an article in German and in English.
My college still makes Chemical Engineers and Chemists demonstrate fluency in English and ability to read in either German or French, as there is so much material in those two languages.
Yes there is. Both Arabic and English have more or less alphabetic scripts, and are not tonal languages. Chinese is a tonal language with tens of thousands of written characters. These two features alone are probably far more difficult for Arabic speakers to learn than any set of features from English.
What will determine whether English is supplanted by another lingua franca in scientific journal articles is not whether another the other language is easy to learn, but whether it comes into general use by the scientific community by the world at large. In other words, if Chinese science becomes so overwhelmingly important that all major advancements occur in that country, then other journals will start to switch to that language and scientists will start having to learn Chinese, no matter how difficult a language it is.
Ed
Most academics of my acquaintance strive for a reading knowledge rather than a speaking knowledge, so the tones aren’t so relevant to this particular thread. And having studied a little Chinese, I really don’t think the lack of an alphabet is nearly so difficult as you make it out to be. To learn to speak or write Chinese is quite difficult (not only the tones, but as an English speaker, the phonemes themselves), but I think you’re overestimating the writing system as an obstacle for reading alone. Even quite good dictionaries make do with only three or four thousand characters, and once you learn the radicals and the way the system works, looking them up is not that bad. I recommend http://de.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php if anyone wants a good online Chinese dictionary. I also think you are underestimating the exceptionally large vocabulary of English and its treacherous orthography.
I will concede that most people who are literate in alphabetic scripts are well and truly freaked out by the concept of the Chinese writing system (or devanagari for that matter), and that alone could impede its adoption as a lingua franca in the modern world.