The two organizing Academies took the initiative of encouraging as open and free a debate as possible amongst scientists and linguists on the following pressing issues:

the prestige and leading role assumed by specialist and scientific languages demands common reflection in the two fields of competency;

the influence of the Anglo-American linguistic model is exceptionally strong on all the world’s languages in the field of science and technology, not only because of the leading role of English speaking countries in these fields, but also because of the pressure exerted by cultural industries and mass communication;

the risk for the Italian language is that it will end up deprived of incentives in the most important cultural sectors, if its most skilled users, socially and culturally speaking, cannot adopt a mindful and diverse behaviour in relation to the different contexts in which scientific discourse functions: that of pure research, of teaching and, equally important, of dissemination.