Professional Languages

It has come to my attention that many schools of linguistics demand that their students know one or two other languages in addition to English. Not necessarily the ability to speak, but more the ability to read in the language. This is common in many fields, it's common to hear about texts that are only published or available in certain languages, German and French are the most common to my ear. A friend of mine works in art conservation (not to be confused with art restoration) and she told me that acceptance into most departments, though I can't remember if this is still necessarily the case, demands knowledge of how to read both German and French.

According to the Moscow Lomonosov University Russian Language Centre's official website:

Over a quarter of the world's scientific literature is published in Russian.

and a little further down,

It is applied as language of a science - means of dialogue, means of coding and storage of universal knowledge (60-70% of all world information is published in English and Russian languages).

So, it looks like Russian should be up there with the other two, but I have no idea how the breakdown goes. If all of the Russian scholarly works are about super-science and spacecraft and all sorts of thing that I have nothing more than a passing interest in, it might not be the best thing to invest in. I would hope that there would be lots on languages of Russia, such as Yakut, Chuvash, Ossetic, Tuvan, Chukchi, Tatar, and of course, Russian, as well as languages of Soviet states. Also Yukhagir and Votic are other languages I've had the pleasure of at least dealing with some data for, or reading about for whatever reason that could fall into this category.

Would knowledge of Russian though help with articles and the like for things unrelated to Russia and its geographic neighbors? German and French have long histories as languages of academia and Western Europe's exploration and conquest of the Americas, Africa, Oceania, and South East Asia would suggest that they might be better bets if my work dealt with those regions. In my own experiences at university as well, there are a disproportionate number of texts (on all subjects) in German and French.

I've had to read from an etymological dictionary of Latin written in French and maybe one or two other books, but I have little experience reading academically in German or Russian. Personally though, I own a number of linguistics texts and articles in Spanish. Other languages I've had to read academically include Ukrainian and Catalan, but I honestly couldn't be sure of the absolute limit of what I've read in.

Ultimately it looks like, from my experience, it probably wouldn't open up a wealth of information running the gamut to be able to access this information, but as one professor I know always liked to point out that while having more unique qualities might make certain research harder, and make your work not as widely appealing, it does have a certain "sexiness" to it.

In a related issue, it would be nice if there was a text that compiled various linguistic terminology in different languages, particularly the ones most relevant for linguistic study, presumably.