More than 98 percent of all scientific articles published today are in English, but that hasn’t always been the case. “There used to be one language of science in Europe, and it was Latin,” says Michael Gordin, a historian of science at Princeton University who is writing a book about the selection of scientific languages. But researchers began to move away from Latin in the 17th century. Galileo, Newton, and others started writing papers in their native tongues in part to make their work more accessible and in part as a reaction to the Protestant Reformation and the declining influence of the Catholic Church.
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