Lancelot Hogben’s hybrid tongues

Abstract 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.