Non-native English speaking scientists work much harder just to keep up

My comment above is translated from my broken English to simple native-ish English by GPT-4.

This is not a point that's come up in my native-English-speaking bubble. Thanks for pointing this out!

Everyone needs to know the top 10 languages instead of settling on the one most people are already using.

This actually makes sense to me. Reading a paper takes time on the scale of hours, and having to stop to parse difficult sentences or look up unfamiliar words can add to that substantially. Writing a paper takes time on the scale of weeks to months, and there's a lot that goes into it other than putting words down on paper. Making figures, figuring out how to argue a certain point, thinking about what examples to provide to best illustrate what you're trying to get across--these are big parts of the writing process that are more or less language agnostic in the sense that the time-intensive part can be carried out in the writer's native language and the result translated into English.

If I were to try to read a paper in my field in Russian (a language I have a decent but far from fluent grasp on, and I don't know the jargon of my field) I would expect it to take at least twice as long as reading it in English. Translating one of my papers into Russian would take a long time, but it would not double the total time spent on writing the paper.

When writing people needs just a small subset of the language. Lets say that with the 10% of the language you can express most ideas in a simple way, and be understood. When you read you face a different subset, maybe a much more wide vocabulary, a lot of phrasal verbs, not familiar constructions, local jargon or ambiguous cultural context... plus the research theme, that can be difficult to grasp by itself.

A funny and not uncommon fact when you are in an international congress is to find that everybody understands the other, until the English native researcher starts to speak.

Journals often look for this symptoms as a seal of quality, but it is not. The sad fact is that speaking English well doesn't made you an expert on science, or a genius, you are just an English-native.

People don't learn their mother tongues from books, they learn it from their parents. Languages begin to die out not when people can no longer learn them, but when their native speakers cease to find it useful, because a larger culture has assimilated them and they get more out of using the majority language instead.

Consider a future when a Spaniard spends most of their day talking in English to people online, and everyone else they talk to also does the same. There's an inflection point at which everyone just decides to speak in English all the time.

Oh no, no, no, no.

If I had to guess I'd say your native language is one of world's top 10 and translation works pretty well between those top 10 languages. My native language has less native speakers than there are people living in the borough of Bronx in NYC. Machine/AI translation is laughably bad. And we're in a good position because we've had written word and high literacy for long time now. For languages lacking those there's no hope basically, these languages will be dead in next 100-200 years. Even Irish is struggling despite having state support thrown at it for quite some time now, for unofficial languages that don't have neither prestige nor incentives to be learned there is zero hope left. Zero.

Thanks, this made me laugh.

No, there are enough things which can mean multiple things in one language and doesn't have the same pairing in the other.

Not sure why they are the gatekeepers of science. It seems like something out of the 1970s before the era of internet.

Its good to see that people are able to write a paper and just post it on a website.

Anecdotal. Here's another: my language teachers from year 3-12 were above average if anything—most of my peers were at least conversational in Spanish (or their selected language) by high school.

At the time, the school system offered Spanish, French, German and Latin. Those who took Latin almost always had medical school ambitions. I asked.

PRC academic system that heavily focuses on science is spitting out educated classes that can in aggregate rival the size (and increasingly quality) of the English tertiary network. The current STEM production rate is ~5M or OECD combined. People mocked at PRC academic paper mills a few years ago, but now PRC talent is topping science and innovation indexes (controlled for quality), that's the natural outcome of exploiting talent at PRC scale. Project trend to 2050 (past 26 years of new births already locked in) and PRC can feasibly hammer out 100M+ talent in just STEM, and most importantly, increasingly be able to retain talent without the best being brain drained. Effect going forward is that PRC is going to snowball the generation of high impact scientific research and it will increasingly be written in mandarin - PRC removed mandatory English education. PRC scientific base will likely be large enough to rival English RoW, the dynamic will be more the PRC science sphere will be less inclined to integrate with the Anglo sphere. Especially if translation tech improves. IMO the mandarin science ecosystem will be fine competing if not leading in her own bubble. If anything, the PRC might prefer the gatekeeping science behind language as a competitive advantage. Global science will splinter and mandarin science will be it's own pole.

Shortcoming of India elite demographic dividend argument is, western academic institutes have limited capacity to absorb Indian talent, who let’s be frank, is replacing current cohort or PRC talent due to geopolitics which will make Indian brain drain problem worse and PRC talent retention better. English proficiency among brain drained elites will make spinning up indigenous Indian S&T at scale difficult, which India herself has a poor track record of exploiting. That can change with time obviously, but IMO there's something systemic happening with Indian diaspora doing well abroad for much longer than PRC diaspora but not meaningfully converting that into success for their birth country. Without India actually raising the ceiling for western academic ecosystem, you're looking at anglo and mandarin ecosystems competing closely. Unless anglos massively boost skill immigration, but that's politically difficult and the opposite is just as likely.

The only way to fix this is to make the lingua franca a constructed language. I'm not exactly against the idea of Esperanto being the lowest common denominator. However, there's this implication in your post and the article that English being the wrong language is some thinly veiled imperialism, racism, or something. Science is not that way. If there was an easier language to communicate to an audience with they'd use that. The "base" language of English is far, far simpler than other languages. Gendered pronouns are available in almost every language and English is one of the only languages where you can replace them with non-gendered pronouns if you so choose. In fact, I wrote this entire post without using any gendered language. This would be impossible in nearly any other widely spoken language.

It would be easier if the frothing at the mouth pro-DEI-at-all-costs people would just say what they mean. Then the argument could be addressed correctly - English replaced Latin because it was easier and evolving. Chinese is the only language that would replace it based on paper-origin/language ratio and Chinese is an order of magnitude or more complicated. Even just speaking about the alphabet it's something like 100x larger.

> obligatory gender in animate pronouns

While it's just one in a long list of things, I'll point out that singular "they" is available (and has a long history) for people wishing to use non-gendered, animate pronouns. (I have also heard "it", but, while everyone's mileage will differ, my brain has a much harder time getting over the difficulty with reading "it" as animate than it does the difficulty with reading "they" as singular.)