“I was watching two Japanese scientists talking to one another. One was, perhaps, an immunologist. The other was a specialist in something like … say… Cholesterol transports in human cells. They were writing on a whiteboard, in Japanese, while trying to understand each other’s perspective on a problem in molecular biology. Suddenly, they switched to English, and continued the discussion. I later asked them why they did that.

‘In Japanese, the language that is intrinsic to the two different disciplines is nearly irreconcilable. It would have taken us forever to attempt to understand each other.”

What the answer meant was that English allows for a broad range of play between the formal and the informal, in English, we can make natural metaphors and analogies that the formal requirements of Japanese speech would inhibit, if not prohibit. By switching to a language whose layers of formality are far more flexible, we saved precious time, and we both realized that we needed »a different language to facilitate understanding.”

— an anonymous informant