Interesting post on Slate.com about the transition of the primary language in the scientific community from German to English.
I learned English as a second language. Becoming an Anglophone turned out to be a crucial advantage in a brief scientific career years later. (I once worked as a medicinal chemist.) English is de rigueur for many things, but especially for science. More than three-quarters of scientific papers today are published in English—and in some fields it is more than 90 percent, according to data compiled by Scott Montgomery in his book Does Science Need a Global Language?.
As recently as the 1960s, some 40 percent of scientific literature was published in French, German, or Russian. Taxonomy has a Latin naming system, and astronomy is peppered with Arabic- and Persian-named stars—reminders of places where scientific prestige was once concentrated. As a student struggling with organic chemistry, I had the benefit of a German-speaking roommate to elucidate the mysterious nomenclature of so-called “e-” and “z-” molecular configurations: The estands for entgegen, meaning opposite; z is for zusammen, meaning together. The fact that the inventors of this naming convention—two Brits and a Swiss-Croatian—chose German to denote their rule in 1956 says something about the preeminence of the continental language in chemistry. “When I was young,” Alain-Jacques Valleron of the French Academy of Sciences told me, “all the good students would learn German.”