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Scott L. Montgomery is an independent scholar who teaches at the University of Washington in Seattle. Trained as a geologist, Montgomery has interests that span the sciences and the humanities, as the titles of some of his books demonstrate: Minds for the Making: The Role of Science in American Education, 1750–1990 (1994), The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science (2002), Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures and Time (2002), and Does Science Need a Global Language? English and the Future of Research (2013), from which this selection is excerpted. Montgomery’s perspective on the spread of English as the lingua franca, or shared language, among scientists globally is especially interesting because he is a practicing scientist. As Montgomery notes, “What has happened to modern science is remarkable, revolutionary.” He later comments, “It is this ability of scientists throughout the world to speak and write to each other, to read each other’s work directly, and to collaborate without mediators of any kind that defines the new era.” As you read, you’ll notice that Montgomery’s approach to this topic is anything but naïve. He is quick to criticize some common assumptions people make about English and why it is widely used today, and he is quick to point out some of the limitations of the continuing monolingualism of many people who are born as native speakers of English. In reading this excerpt, pay special attention to the ways that Montgomery combines facts with personal experience to make this point.
Chapter 4: Impacts
A DISCUSSION OF LIMITATIONS AND ISSUES FOR A GLOBAL LANGUAGE
SCOTT L. MONTGOMERY
During the summer of 2010, I spent three weeks in northwestern Australia as part of a geology seminar run by the University of Washington. Our travels took us through a sizable portion of the Kimberleys, a wild, remote, and pellucid region of low-ridge mountains, sandstone gorges, and small towns encased by vast savannah ranches and bordered by tiny Aboriginal communities. In August, near the end of “the Dry,” the area overflows with pitiless sun. The heat falls with a physical weight that can leave the visitor from higher latitudes breathless.
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Native languages in Northern Australia are being lost at a disturbing rate. Long-standing conflict with white settlers destroyed many Aboriginal groups, forcing others into enclaves caught between a hunter-gatherer past now largely gone and a modern present yet to be fulfilled. One evening, during a rare, merciful breeze in the town of Timber Creek, I fell into conversation with Roger, an Aboriginal man perhaps in his late thirties, who had flashed me a friendly smile outside the grocery store and asked me where I was from. “I knew you wasn’t from around here,” he said. It emerged that he is a father of two boys, just as I am, and so we first traded tales of sibling relations and discipline problems. Then I mentioned the language issue; he nodded.
His boys, he said, knew three languages, none of them completely. It worried him. Roger’s own birth tongue was Warimajarri, and he also knew Gurindji pretty well; but his wife came from over Tennant Creek way and spoke Warumungu and also Warlpiri. Both parents knew Kriol, a pidgin blending English and several Aboriginal tongues, used by white settlers and natives since the early twentieth century as a lingua franca across much of the region. The boys spoke their father’s language fairly well, their mother’s first tongue, Warumungu, better still, and Kriol best of all, because both parents and the extended family often used it at home. When the boys spoke Warumungu they might mix in some English words, too, since this was seen as status speech. At school, Kriol was used by the other children, and some of the teachers knew it. Roger noted that his sons and their friends typically switched back and forth between all three languages, depending on who was talking and whether or not a nearby adult might understand what they were saying. A big problem, he said, was that Kriol contains a lot of English words. “The white fellas always thought me boys could speak English fine, but they can’t. They had terrible time in school. Now the government change everything in school to English, so I think they learn it better. I think this might be good for them. Good for their future.”
I asked Roger how he had learned his English. “I learned well at school — me mum made me study hard!” he laughed. “Later, I worked at a cattle station. Had to use it there. Now I been working in a store about ten year, using English every day.” It was time for me to get back to camp, so I shook Roger’s hand, wished his family well, and began to leave. “Hang on,” he said suddenly. “Your boys in school, right? What they want to be?” “Well,” I began, “one wants to be a doctor, the other a scientist, I think, to study the oceans.” “You a lucky man.” Roger shook his head and smiled, looking down. Then he looked up: “How many tongues your boys speak?” I replied, “Well, just one for now, though they’re studying another in school.” He gave me a humorous but pitying look. “Got to do better, mate! One never enough!”
PERSPECTIVE
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5 It is common to extol the benefits of using a global tongue for science. Such benefits are perceived to include not merely those of a short-term, practical nature, such as expanded collegiality and more immediate dissemination of findings, but those that will profit science in the long term through the globalization of knowledge. There is, too, the symbolic capital of a “global scientific community” embodied in a shared global tongue. Most researchers around the world, therefore, if asked to comment, would be unlikely to find the status of English problematic or controversial.*
Yet international tongues, past and present, have not been universally kind to their foreign users. Such a language inevitably requires adoption, adaptation, and accommodation, none of which happen overnight, all of which involve difficulty and inequity. Former lingua francas of science — Greek, Latin, Arabic, Chinese among them — did not attain their authority by consensus, but arrived on the back of conquest and empire-building. The impacts they had, for example on tongues that existed before their arrival, were often mixed. They could bring extinction to native languages in conquered territories, but also the creation of new tongues over time, such as the dozens of Romance languages that eventually emerged from Latin. Historically, a dominant language has had profound impacts on any preexisting intellectual community. It has altered many institutions of scholarly practice — education, literacy, practices of reading and writing, the definition of acceptable scholarship, the mobility of scholars themselves.1 Overall, this has involved loss as well as gain. There are thus limits and drawbacks to be considered when a powerful lingua franca gains authority.
To what degree might this be the case with the use of English in the natural sciences? Are there important disadvantages that stand out, and if so, how serious are they? Given the many years of training and the intense competition for resources and rewards in contemporary science, can any such problems be addressed in some way? In truth, these are important, even central questions for the future of scientific endeavor, since they involve the capabilities of researchers themselves.
Scholars of language have paid some attention to these realities and questions.2 The role of English specifically and the issues it presents have been taken up or touched upon by specialists in the field of applied linguistics, yielding much that is valuable. Some of these authors are highly critical of English dominance in the sciences (seeing it, for example, as a loss of diversity); others are more drawn to its linguistic and social aspects. Be that as it may, a number of important conclusions emerge from this work. Here are the main ones relevant to our discussion:
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The global role of English in science has nothing to do with inherent qualities in the language. There is no wondrous “fit” between English and things scientific. The rise of this language is due to historical developments.
English dominance is especially strong in the physical and life sciences and biomedicine. It is less pervasive in applied sciences and less (but increasing) in the social sciences and humanities.
Such dominance is expanding because scientists want broad recognition, desire more opportunities, and understand that these now depend on publishing papers and citations in international journals, where English dominates.
Since English is the native tongue for certain countries, researchers, universities, and companies from those places gain immediate advantage. Most anglophone researchers are monolingual and cite only papers in English.
Poorer, developing nations have less capability to teach and learn English, so their scientists are at a strong disadvantage. This inequity can be understood as a situation of “haves” and “have-nots,” or a type of core-periphery division, with wealthy nations at the center and developing nations at the margins.
In many countries, most science is published in the native tongue. This work is internationally unknown, as it is not cited outside the domestic language community. Its scientific value may be local or it may not; we can’t tell. Important work may go unnoticed, to the disadvantage of science and scientists everywhere.
Many nonnative speakers of English suffer from low confidence when they use this language. There is much struggle, failure, and inefficiency attached to such use.
Bibliographic databases such as SCI and Scopus, as a key part of the evolving “memory” of science, are biased toward publications written in English, though this has changed to a certain degree. Global visibility for any journal accepted into these databases is hugely increased; as a result, there is a powerful incentive for them to publish in English, creating a type of “feedback loop” for the further spread of this language in scientific publication.
No imperial policy is at work to spread scientific English. Non-anglophone scientists are urged to use this language by historical realities, the policies of their research departments, universities, and companies, and the influence of their ambitions.
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Each of these points, and others as well, will be taken up in what follows. The question of this book can’t be adequately answered unless some of these conclusions are interrogated themselves.
[ . . . ]
A FINAL STORY, AND AN IDEA
10 Toward the end of my stay in the Kimberleys, a remarkable event occurred. Driving back to the Gibbs River Road from Tunnel Creek (a kilometer-long walk through a magnificent limestone cavern), the left back wheel of our jeep suddenly flew off, bounding into the bush like a frightened wallaby. The vehicle ground to a stop in the red dirt. Pieces of broken metal lay about, like shrapnel in the dust.
Within a short time, several cars and jeeps had stopped, and we found ourselves surrounded by friendly voices. We were plied with water, beer, bananas, energy bars, and a flow of encouraging words. Two men proved to be mechanics, and conceived a repair that took the better part of two hours. The sun drove the rest of us into the miserly shade of a boab tree, where I ended up talking with a leathery-faced young woman wearing a broad sunhat who was a grad student in environmental science at the Australian National University. I remarked on the kindness shown, and was told that this was typical in the outback. People like a gathering, she said, and also stop because a breakdown can be fatal in such a remote area. The Aboriginals, she noted, had many ways to find water in the Dry. Their territory was like a secret text; they knew hidden watering holes, rainwater gouges in granite, the hollows of certain trees, hand-dug wells in hidden, shady places. In times of drought, they used plants and could find new water by observing the movements of birds. Early in the era of white settlement, men or boys were sometimes kidnapped and forced to show where water could be found. This was especially true of expeditions to the interior, but not those of Donald Thomson.
Thomson was an anthropologist, perhaps the most famous champion of Aboriginal causes in Australian history, who led a series of ethnographic trips between 1957 and 1965 to the Bindibu people in the Great Sandy Desert. Even at this date, many of the Bindibu had never seen a white face and lived the hunter-gatherer life as they had for tens of millennia. To the whites, the Great Sandy was “the land where men perish,” the harshest desert on the continent. The first to cross it was Colonel Peter Warburton in 1873; his expedition fell into legendary difficulties of heat, thirst, and incompetence, and members were forced to survive by eating their much-abused camels and by relying on their Aboriginal tracker, Charley. Several subsequent crossings by later explorers all suffered greatly from lack of water. Thomson, despite many preparations, did not avoid this challenge. Though he had only a single companion plus two trackers, they promptly lost one of the jeeps, and lost the second one before long in the midst of a raging sandstorm.
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Thus stranded, Thomson was soon befriended by a group of the Bindibu. They showed absolutely no fear of him or anything he did, and this extended to the children, who would come over and squat to watch whatever task he was engaged in. Learning a portion of their language, teaching them some of his, Thomson was allowed to live and hunt with this group for several months. He found the people not merely sociable but complex, witty, ingenious. He saw that their lives and songs revolved around water. “It soon became apparent,” he says in his account, “[they] had a practical knowledge of the ecology of the desert in advance of any white man. . . . There was certainly a great deal more water . . . than had been assumed.”3
Eventually, a replacement axle for the second jeep arrived. Thomson decided it was time to return. On the eve of his departure, the people gave him a gift. It was a type of life-giving knowledge. Carved on the back of a wooden atlatl was a design of lines connecting a set of spirals that the leader, Tjappanongo, showed to him.
Sometimes with a stick, or with his finger, he would point to each well or rock hole in turn and recite its name, waiting for me to repeat it after him. Each time, the group of old men listened intently and grunted in approval “Eh!”? or repeated the name again and listened once more. This process continued with the name of each water until they were satisfied with my pronunciation. . . . I realized that here was the most important discovery of the expedition — that what Tjappanongo and the old men had shown to me was really a map . . . of the waters of the vast terrain over which the Bindibu hunted.4
15 Thomson’s journey can be read as an example and as a parable. A more capable society will be one that is able to utilize directly the knowledge of others. In the future, knowing English alone will not be enough. As more of humanity learns this language, and therefore becomes still more multilingual (in many cases), monolingual speakers will increasingly find themselves approaching the edges of a desert where they have less access to a greater part of the outside world. The greatest long-term danger coming from the global spread of English — could it be to its own native speakers?
NOTES
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1. Scott L. Montgomery, Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures and Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
2. A significant literature has come to surround this idea of language inequality or, in ome writings, “injustice.” One branch of this literature has tended to take a highly critical position toward English as a global tongue for science and advocates major changes in language planning and policy for the whole of international scientific publishing. While these writings are mostly by nonscientists and do not much consider, in any consistent manner, the opinions of researchers themselves, they nonetheless raise a number of issues that can be neither avoided nor ignored in any balanced view of the larger situation. A selection would include Ulrich Ammon, “Global English and the Non-Native Speaker: Overcoming Disadvantage,” in Language in the 21st Century, ed. Humphrey Tonkin and Timothy Reagan (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2003), 23–34; Ulrich Ammon, “Language Planning for International Scientific Communication: An Overview of Questions and Potential Solutions,” Current Issues in Language Planning 7 (2006): 1–31; A. Suresh Canagarajah, A Geopolitics of Academic Writing (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002); Bonnie Lee La Madeleine, “Lost in Translation,” Nature 445 (2007): 454–55; R. E. Hamel, “The Dominance of English in the International Scientific Periodical Literature and the Future of Language Use in Science,” AILA Review 20 (2008): 53–71; Humphrey Tonkin, “Language and the Ingenuity Gap,” Scientist 22, no. 4 (2008): 1–10; Erin Bidlake, “Whose Voice Gets Read? English as the International Language of Scientific Publication,” E-pisteme 1, no. 1 (2008): 3–21; Miguel Clavero, “ ‘Awkward wording. Rephrase’: Linguistic Injustice in Ecological Journals,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 25, no. 10 (2010): 552; and Charles Durand, La Mise en Place des Monopoles du Savoir (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001). A second branch of the relevant literature focuses less on issues of policy and intervention and more on the attitudes of researchers, as well as giving a more fine-grained analysis of nonnative speakers’ experiences in working with English. Some representative publications here include Gibson Ferguson, Carmen Pérez-Llantada, and Ramón Plo, “English as an International Language of Scientific Publication: A Study of Attitudes,” World Englishes 30, no. 1 (2011): 41–59; Diane Belcher, “Seeking Acceptance in an English-Only Research World,” Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007): 1–22; Mary Curry and Theresa Lillis, “Multilingual Scholars and the Imperative to Publish in English: Negotiating Interests, Demands and Rewards,” TESOL Quarterly 38, no. 4 (2007): 663–88; John Flowerdew, “The Non-Anglophone Scholar at the Periphery of Scientific Communication,” AILA Review 20 (2008): 14–27; Laura Landa, “Academic Language Barriers and Language Freedom,” Current Issues in Language Planning 7 (2006): 61–81; and Ragnhild Ljosland, “English in Norwegian Academia: A Step toward Diglossia,” World Englishes 26, no. 4 (2007): 395–410.
3. Donald F. Thomson, “The Bindibu Expedition III,” Geographical Journal 128, no. 3 (September 1962): 262–78; quotation is from p. 274.
4. Ibid., 274.
RESPOND •
How does this selection challenge you to think about English and its use in the world in new ways? What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of any global language, according to Montgomery?
The “Perspective” section of this excerpt does a very good job of summarizing many of the claims made about the dominance of English as the global language of science. (Later in this chapter, before the closing section, “A Final Story, and an Idea,” Montgomery examines these claims in greater detail; this section of the chapter is omitted here.) How does this list of claims form an argument? In other words, how does the strategic ordering of the list of claims become an argument? What sort of argument is it — an argument of fact, an argument of definition, an evaluative argument, a proposal argument? How do you know?
Can parts of the “Perspective” section be analyzed as Toulmin arguments? Which ones? Why? (See Chapter 7 for information on Toulmin’s method of analyzing arguments.)
Montgomery uses personal experience narratives as bookends to this chapter, beginning and ending with a story about something that happened to him. How do these stories influence the way you read and understand the “Perspective” section of the selection, which is based on different kinds of evidence?
An interesting aspect of this selection is the way that Montgomery represents the speech of Roger, the Aboriginal Australian with whom he speaks in the opening section of the text. As is clear, English is not Roger’s first or only language, and the variety of English he would have been exposed to is obviously not American English but some variety found in Australia. Study Roger’s speech carefully. Do you see patterns to the language that differ from those a native speaker might use? Do you see any words you associate with Australian English? It is quite easy to represent the speech of speakers like Roger in ways that are patronizing or mocking. Do you think Montgomery avoided doing so? Do you think he set out to do so? Why or why not?
Write an evaluative argument in which you consider the claims Montgomery makes in the closing section of this essay. Are there perils to being monolingual for individuals? For countries? In other words, are there ways in which monolingualism is limiting for individuals or countries? In contrast, what costs come with the challenges of multilingualism? Taking a clue from Montgomery in responding to this question, don’t fall prey to much of what you might hear about these issues. In other words, focus on the findings of research rather than opinions that may not be backed up by fact. You’ll likely need to do some research if you want your opinions on these topics to be taken seriously. (See Chapter 10 for information on evaluative arguments and the chapters in Part 4 for help with research.)
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