How the languages of the world appeared is largely a mystery. Considering that it might have taken thousands of years, it is attractive to see how deaf people can create novel sign languages unconsciously. Interestingly, children played an important role in the development of these novel languages. However, how exactly this happened has not been documented.

In a series of studies, researchers attempted to recreate exactly this process. Children were invited to stay in two different rooms and an online connection was set up between them.After a brief familiarization with the set- up, the researchers sneakily (偷偷地）turned off the sound and watched as the children found new ways of communicating that go beyond spoken language.

The children's task was to describe an image with different themes in a coordination game. With concrete things-like a hammer or a fork-children quickly found a solution by imitating the matching action, for example, eating, in a gesture. But the researchers repeatedly challenged the children with new, more abstract pictures. In the course of the study, the images to be described became more and more complex, which was also reflected in the gestures that the children produced. In order to communicate, the children invented separate gestures for actors and actions and began to combine them-thus creating a kind of small local grammar.

How does a language come into being? Based on the present study, the following steps appear reasonable: first, people create reference to actions and objects through signs that resemble things. The precondition for this is a common ground of experience between interaction partners. Partners also coordinate (配合）by imitating each other so that they use the same signs for the same things. The signs thus gain interpersonal and eventually common meaning. Over time, the relationships between the signs and things become more abstract and the meaning of the individual signs becomes more specific. Grammatical structures are gradually introduced when there is a need to communicate more complex facts. However, the most remarkable aspect of the current studies is that these processes can be observed under controlled circumstances and within 30 minutes.

In these times of worldwide communications, science is no different from other professions in that English is now the established “universal” language. Like it or not, most scientific reports are published in English, although some countries also have journals that are published in their native languages. But how did English develop into the dominant language of scientific discourse (会话)? Was it a joint decision or did it happen progressively and “accidentally”? And was it a positive move for all?

Arabic was used in all countries with an Islamic culture in the middle ages, while in Europe Latin was used for communication in science and education until the 17th century. During the Enlightenment, Latin lost favour as it was thought to be too complicated. Instead, scientific communication became more “provincial”; German, French, Italian and English were used in their respective countries and colonies, with different languages being more important in different disciplines — German, for instance, was widely used in physics, chemistry and some aspects of medicine and psychology. The relative use of these languages changed through history, reflecting the relative growth and decline of science, culture and economics in these countries. Thus, the use of French predominated in the 18th century, whereas German was most widespread in the 19th and English dominated the 20th. Social upheaval (剧变) also played a role — the use of French declined dramatically after World War I, whereas that of German increased in parallel until World War II. After World War II, and especially in the past 30 years, English progressively established itself as the primary language for scientific communication as America came to dominate both basic research and technology. In the 1920s the need for a universal language of science was debated, and a synthetic language, Esperanto, was developed but never widely used.

Despite the obvious appeal of having a common language that allows scientists around the world to communicate with one another, there can indeed be some drawbacks in using English for all communication — non-native English speakers can be at a disadvantage compared with native speakers when it comes to expressing and highlighting the interest of their papers and communicating with editors and referees. Careful copy editing can tackle the problem of accessibility of accepted manuscripts, but upstream of this stage it is down to all parties to ensure that they evaluate work on its scientific merit rather than its proper use of grammar.

The use of a universal language for communication in science is unavoidable as one obvious advantage is that findings can be more widely accessed, and resisting this concept for the sake of cultural difference would seem to be anything but productive. However, the use of national language and less technical language is useful in communicating science to the general public, as is the case with the Nature gateways in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and German.