Lancelot Hogben’s hybrid tongues: From Interglossa to global English

Michael D. Gordin
Princeton University

Lancelot Hogben (1895–1975), a peripatetic and prolific mathematical geneticist and science populariser, occupies a special niche in the history of scientific communication and translation. Not only was he a trenchant observer of the increasing dominance of Global English in scientific publications, he also leveraged his command of the cosmopolitan scientific lexicon to offer an alternative: a constructed language he called ‘Interglossa’. His extensive attention to linguistic evolution and linguistic futures peaked during World War II, particularly as a result of his forced circumnavigation of the globe during the ‘Phoney War’ of 1940. Both political and linguistic disillusionments following the war pushed him inexorably to a grudging reconciliation with some form of English as the basis for scientific (and other) communication.

Publication history

Date received: 29 September 2022

Date accepted: 11 December 2023

Published online: 28 January 2025

Table of contents

Lancelot Hogben was born two months prematurely in December 1895, and until his death in August 1975 he generally seemed to be ahead of schedule in mathematical genetics, science popularisation, and language planning. This is an odd combination of interests, and by every measure Lancelot Hogben was odd. “He could be a difficult colleague. He was incapable of concealing disapproval or personal dislike,” attested zoologist G. P. Wells, son of the polymathic novelist H. G. Wells (so he would know). “Some saw in him at least a touch of paranoia. But there can be no questioning the sincerity of his reformist ardour: if he was a tremendous rocker of other people’s boats, it was never very calm in his own” (Wells 1978, 184). Although Hogben sniped at what he perceived as the establishment from the margins — sometimes the literal margins of a tottering British Empire or a global military cataclysm — the peculiar circumstances of his biography placed him at the centre of many of the pivotal debates about the role of science in public life in the twentieth century. Whether one considers him to have been on the right or the wrong side of history, his historical trajectory offers an unparalleled vantage point on many underappreciated questions.

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