ABSTRACT
The German communicative community expanded to include foreign-language speakers in many countries. For academic communication, the German-language community limited itself predominantly to its own language only during the relatively short period from about the middle of the nineteenth century to about the middle of the twentieth century. While the theoretical sciences tend strongly towards English as their academic language of choice, the opposite pole to the “anglophone” group of disciplines is formed by the “national-language-orientated” social sciences and especially the humanities, which adhere most firmly to German. The position of German as an international academic language may be unshakable only in German studies – because, according to the German Council for Science and the Humanities, it is “in the nature of the subject matter”, that “outstanding research cannot be achieved without a knowledge of German-language research literature”.
