Agham Lingua Franca Milk Tea

Marco Angelo Rasos  |  8 July 2025

Students of science should be masters of communications. 

And the evidence is that we are masters of the English language of the times, or the lingua franca of the age. 

During Newton's time, the common language is Latin. Einstein's Theory of Relativity was written in German because it was THE language of science during that age.

In the 21st century, English is the Lingua Franca of science - or the common language that allows people of different primary languages or mother tongues to communicate. 

Perhaps, with the growing strength of China, science communications might become Mandarin. Or could it be possible that we would all speak in Python or Java or the ancient C on which these two programming languages were built on, in the digital world? 

But regardless of which language the world ends up using to communicate, it is imperative that students in science learn the scientific language of the times, and that, for now, is English plus a lavish sprinkling of scientific terms.

And those, my friends, are the two heads of the guard dog Fluffy: first, students of Science should be masters of the English language and second, scientific terminologies. And of course, as every guard dog should be viewed, the third more problematic head is our inability or difficulty to blend one and two into a homogenous mixture to make good tasting ice cold milk tea (the craze of the times) that is accessible and understandable to a vast majority of our people in the Philippines. 

The immediate conclusion here is that students of Science should be great communicators by creating accessible and understandable science communications through their mastery of the English language and scientific terminologies.