Subject – ENGLISH

TOPIC – INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE AND

TECHNOLOGY ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Supervised By:

MS.SAYANTANI PATHAK
Asst .Prof in ENGLISH

NAME: SIMRAN GARG

Roll No. – 25
Registration No. -

COURSE: BBA-LLB
SEMESTER : II
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

With profound gratitude and sense of indebtedness I place on record my sincerest thanks to Mrs. Sayantani Pathak
ASST.PROF in English, Indian Institute of Legal Studies, for her invaluable guidance, sound advice and affectionate attitude
during the course of my studies.

I have no hesitation in saying that he molded raw clay into whatever I am through his incessant efforts and

keen interest shown throughout my academic pursuit. It is due to his patient guidance that I have been able

to complete the task.

I would also thank the Indian institute of Legal Studies Library for the wealth of information therein. I

also express my regards to the Library staff for cooperating and making available the books for this

project research paper.

Finally, I thank my beloved parents for supporting me morally and guiding me throughout the project

work.

TEACHER’S SINGATURE: _______________ STUDENT’S SIGNATURE: _________

DATE : _ _ /_ _ /_ _ _ _ DATE : _ _ /_ _ /_ _ _ _
 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

The aims and objectives of the project is to focus on the influence of science and technology on English
language.

STATEMENT OF PROBLEM

To find out the influence of technology on English.

RESEARCH QUESTION

(i) How has science influenced English?

(ii) How has technology influenced English?

HYPOTHESIS

This research is an attempt of learning the influence of science and technology on English language.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

The methodology used for this project is doctrinal and analytical of information without any field work .
 INDEX

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................. 5
CHAPTER I ........................................................................................................................................................... 6
THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE : ........................................................................ 6
CHAPTER II .......................................................................................................................................................... 8
THE INFLUENCE OF TECHNOLOGY ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ...................................................... 8
CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................................................................... 9
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................ 10
 INTRODUCTION

The most striking thing about our present day civilization is probably the part that science has played in
bringing it to pass. We have only to think of the progress that has been made in medicine and the sciences
to realize the difference that make off our own day from that of only a few generations ago in the
diagnosis, treatment, prevention and cure of disease. In every field of science there has been needed in the
last two centuries for thousands of new terms. The great majority of these are technical words known only
to the specialist, but a certain number of them in time in time become familiar to the layperson and pass
into general use.
It is noticeable that the great expansion of the scientific vocabulary during the past three hundred years
has gone on at an ever increasing pace. And in our century the flow has continued.

With the spread and development of English around the world, English is used as a second language in a
country like India and for some people the first language. It enjoys a high prestige in the country . At
present the role and status of english in india is higher than ever evidenced by its position as a key subject
of medium of instruction , curriculum . As the number of English learners is increasing ,different teaching
methods have been implemented to test the effectiveness of the teaching process. Technology and science
is utilised for the upliftment of
Modern styles , satisfies both visual and auditory senses of the students. According to David Graddol
“English is the language at the leading edge of scientific and technological development , new thinking
ineconomics,management,new literatures and entertainment genre.
 CHAPTER I
THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE :

Permafrost, oxygen, hydrogen — it all looks like science to me. But these terms actually have origins in
Russian, Greek and French. Today though, if a scientist is going to coin a new term, it's most likely in
English. And if they are going to publish a new discovery, it is most definitely in English.Look no further
than the Nobel prize awarded for physiology and medicine to Norwegian couple May-Britt and Edvard
Moser. Their research was written and published in English. This was not always so.
“If you look around the world in 1900, and someone told you, ‘Guess what the universal language of
science will be in the year 2000?’ You would first of all laugh at them because it was obvious that no one
language would be the language of science, but a mixture of French, German and English would be the
right answer,” said Michael Gordin. Gordin is a professor of the history of science at Princeton and his
upcoming book, Scientific Babel, explores the history of language and science. Gordin says that English
was far from the dominant scientific language in 1900. The dominant language was German.
“So the story of the 20th century is not so much the rise of English as the serial collapse of German as the
up-and-coming language of scientific communication,” Gordin said.
You may think of Latin as the dominant language of science. And for many, many years it was the
universal means of communication in Western Europe — from the late medieval period to the mid-17th
century, and then it began to fracture. Latin became one of many languages in which science was done.
The first person to publish extensively in his native language, according to Gordin, was Galileo. Galileo
wrote in Italian and was then translated to Latin so that more scientists might read his work.
Fast forward back to the 20th century, how did English come to dominate German in the realm of science?
“The first major shock to the system of basically having a third of science published in English, a third in
French, and a third in German — although it fluctuated based on field and Latin still held out in some
places — was World War I, which had two major impacts,” Gordin said.
After World War I, Belgian, French and British scientists organized a boycott of scientists from Germany
and Austria. They were blocked from conferences and weren't able to publish in Western European
journals.“Increasingly, you have two scientific communities, one German, which functions in the defeated
[Central Powers] of Germany and Austria, and another that functions in Western Europe, which is mostly
English and French,” Gordin explained. It’s that moment in history, he added, when international
organizations to govern science, like the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, were
established. And those newly established organizations begin to function in English and French. German,
which was the dominant language of chemistry, was written out. The second effect of World War I took
places across the Atlantic in the United States. Starting in 1917 when the US entered the war, there was a
wave of anti-German hysteria that swept the country.
“At this moment something that’s often hard to keep in mind is that large portions of the US still speak
German,” Gordin said. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota there were many, many German speakers.
World War I changed all that. “German is criminalized in 23 states. You’re not allowed to speak it in
public, you’re not allowed to use it in the radio, you’re not allowed to teach it to a child under the age 10,”
Gordin explained. The Supreme Court overturned those anti-German laws in 1923, but for years that was
the law of the land.
 What that effectively did, according to Gordin, was decimate foreign langulearning in the US.“In 1915,
Americans were teaching foreign languages and learning foreign languages about the same level as
Europeans were," Gordin said. "After these laws go into effect, foreign language education drops
massively. Isolationism kicks in in the 1920s, even after the laws are overturned and that means people
don’t think they need to pay attention to what happens in French or in German."

This results in a generation of future scientists who come of age in the 1920s with limited exposure to
foreign languages. That was also the moment, according to Gordin, when the American scientific
establishment started to take over dominance in the world. “And you have a set of people who don’t speak
foreign languages,” said Gordin, “They’re comfortable in English, they read English, they can get by in
English because the most exciting stuff in their mind is happening in English. So you end up with a very
American-centric, and therefore very English-centric community of science after World War II.”

You can see evidence of this world history embedded into scientific terms themselves, Gordin said.
Take for example the word “oxygen.” The term was born in the 1770s as French chemists are developing
a new theory of burning. In their scientific experiments, they needed a new term for a new notion of an
element they were constructing.
“They pick the term ‘oxygen’ from Greek for ‘acid’ and ‘maker’ because they have a theory that oxygen
is the substance that makes up acids. They’re wrong about that, but the word acid-maker is what they
create and they create it from Greek. That tells you that French scientists and European scientists of that
period would have a good classical education,” Gordin said.

The English adopted the word “oxygen” wholesale from the French. But the Germans didn't, instead they
made up their own version of the word by translating each part of the word into “sauerstoff” or acid
substance. “So you can see how at a certain moments, certain words get formed and the tendency was for
Germans, in particular, to take French and English terms and translate them. Now that’s not true. Now
terms like online, transistor, microchip, that stuff is just brought over in English as a whole. So you see
different fashions about how people feel about the productive capacity of their own language versus
borrowing a term wholesale from another,” Gordin said.
 CHAPTER II

THE INFLUENCE OF TECHNOLOGY ON THE ENGLISH

LANGUAGE

Technology’s role in our lives is astonishing. Its effect on the way we communicate has changed the
English language forever. To be more specific, the way we speak today is, by and large, the way we spoke
before the internet became what it is, albeit with an enriched vocabulary. Conventions of telephone
conversations have, to my mind, changed little: we still use the same methods – if not words – to greet and
sign off, for example.
What is hugely different, however, is the way we write today. That is the area where technology has had
the biggest impact.
Email altered the structure of the letter as a communicative tool. It brought with it a whole new etiquette,
as well as new conventions and new abbreviations, such as IMO (in my opinion), FWIW (for what it’s
worth), IIRC (if I remember correctly) and FYI (for your information). And it introduced the idea that
WORDS IN UPPER CASE MEAN WE ARE SHOUTING, while lower case writing is the accepted form.
But email English is nothing compared to the impact upon language driven by mobile phone users. The
rate and extent of change this has had is truly astounding.
The way we write our text messages is now so widely accepted that it has infiltrated mainstream
advertising. Here are two examples I can think of immediately: Virgin Media, the British company, ran a
campaign several months ago for its provision of broadband (or Brdbnd, as it called it) and, a little more
locally to me, a council campaign advised us: ‘Dnt B Wstfl’.
And then we have the meteoric rise of blogging. There are now well over 100million blogs worldwide.
Add to that the even-more-baffling growth of the key social networking websites – MySpace, Bebo,
Facebook – and we start to see the whole picture. The watch-words today are ‘user-generated content’
(UGC). So, to sum up…email + texting + blogging + social networking sites = people writing more how
they speak and less like they used to write. And, essentially, less like they had to write – either for a boss,
a parent or a teacher. Also, let’s remember one of the basic driving elements in this transition: the screen
size of mobile phones is small and, therefore, text messaging was always, by default, short. And short,
inevitably, becomes shorter. People frequently writing the same things would reduce the length of those
words and phrases so that the meaning remained intact while the effort required to communicate – and the
amount of screen space used – were both minimised. So why have I written numerous ebooks, articles and
tips offering help for better writing and detailing the intricacies of English grammar?
Because while mainstream, digital communication alters language use, it does not eradicate the
traditional; it merely sits alongside convention. And there are plenty of people who are still interested in
English as we have known it since before the 1990s, when mobiles and Messrs Page and Brin (Google’s
founders) came to prominence. Here are some statistics:
More people currently have a mobile phone capable of accessing the internet than have a PC with net
access (source: Mobile Top Level Domain, the organisation charged with overseeing the ‘.mobi’ domain
name registration)Sending text messages is now almost as common as talking on mobile phonesOnly 12%
of mobile users never use their phone for texting (and virtually half of these people are over 65).70% of
15-24 year-olds say they ‘could not live’ without their mobile phoneThere are an estimated 110 million-
150 million blogs in existence (although many of these are abandoned soon after they are established)
 CONCLUSION

According to David Graddol “English is the language at the leading edge of scientific and technological
development , new thinking ineconomics,management,new literatures and entertainment genre.”
Gordin is a professor of the history of science at Princeton and his upcoming book, Scientific Babel,
explores the history of language and science.
Gordin says that English was far from the dominant scientific language in 1900. The dominant language
was German.
Technology’s role in our lives is astonishing. Its effect on the way we communicate has changed the
English language forever.
To be more specific, the way we speak today is, by and large, the way we spoke before the internet
became what it is, albeit with an enriched vocabulary.
In every field of science there has been needed in the last two centuries for thousands of new terms. The
great majority of these are technical words known only to the specialist, but a certain number of them in
time in time become familiar to the layperson and pass into general use.
It is noticeable that the great expansion of the scientific vocabulary during the past three hundred years
has gone on at an ever increasing pace. And in our century the flow has continued.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

WEBSITES REFERED

http://www.englishlanguageexpert.com/english-language-articles/the-impact-of-technology-on-the-
english-language/

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/08/english-universal-language-science-
research/400919/

http://www.englishlanguageexpert.com/english-language-articles/the-impact-of-Science-on-the-english-
language/

On 22nd of april 2017 at 1.28.p.m.