Though he’s been associated with a very strange idea he never had, Edward Sapir was quite explicit about this loss over a hundred years ago. Thinking specifically about a later passage warning people about the glossocide English language. But it’s been clear in his work from long before that excerpt that we’re missing out when we focus on a single language.

In this case, it can apply to quite a few academics who are native speakers of one of the aforementioned “world languages”. Difficult to be a monolingual academic in an exclusively local language. Much easier as a French- or Mandarin-speaker to become an academic without learning much English. And speaking of monolinguals, there is a clear bias in tech towards monolingualism.