There were many lingua francas of which French was supposedly the first global lingua franca. That changed and it became English (from what I understand). We will probably see another language become the lingua franca, so my question is: should it be English? Are there better candidates out there? Why / why not?
It’s gonna be Chinese whether y’all like it or not.
I propose Icelandic
A lingua franca isn’t decided upon, it just happens to become one because of some power its speakers hold. In the Indonesian archipelago, Malay became a lingua franca because it was used by traders. In Europe, French was a lingua franca because French held a large amount of prestige among the European nobility. Now, English is the global lingua franca because English-speaking media have dominated the global media landscape.
If you want there to be another lingua franca in Europe, that language will somehow need to attain a good reason for it to become one. You can’t just pass a law proclaiming it now being ‘the lingua franca of Europe’.
Forcing people to speak eg. German by law might work, though you’ll probably have to be prepared to coerce people into actually doing so, and thus will have to ask yourself whether that’s worth it. Otherwise, there’s a good chance people will not really give a shit about your stupid law.
You could also maybe abolish all EU level accommodation for other languages than the official language in a new federalised Europe. Then, if you want anything done at that level, you have no choice but to use the official, non-English, language. This seems like it might spur an elitist environment where only a small layer of Europeans (outside of the country from which the speakers of the official language originate) will generally be able to speak that language.
This all seems a bit fantastical, though. Unless Europeans en masse stop consuming English language media, and at the same time start consuming the media of one specific other language (thus it’s a movement away from English and toward some other language by language users themselves), there won’t be a new lingua franca in Europe.
This seems like it might spur an elitist environment where only a small layer of Europeans (outside of the country from which the speakers of the official language originate) will generally be able to speak that language.
Not your main point, but I watched an interview with some senior translator person at the EC, and they said that the EC very intentionally refrained from codifying a “Brussels English” over exactly this concern: that it would lead to official government documents being written in a form that the typical person in the EU would consider distant, have a “Brussels elites that spoke differently from me” impact. The concern was that this would have negative political effects.
Can’t recall the name of the guy, but IIRC he had a British accent. Was an older guy.
Did drive home to me that there is a lot of political consideration taking place over policy decisions that I probably wouldn’t normally have expected.
That’s really interesting. Language is one of the main ways we distinguish ourselves (often subconciously). Designing a special Brussels English would likely make the ‘Brussels Elite’ more of a distinguishable ‘they’ indeed.
I think we are at a point now where almost everybody in Europe is able to speak at least some English. So cultural exchange has never been easier. Why make it more difficult again by adding another language people have to learn first?
As a Brit (but European at heart and strong “Remain” voter), I am quick to remind fellow Brits that English is a language heavily derived from our European ancestors: French, Latin, Germanic (Proto-Germanic, “Old English”, Old Norse, Romance, etc), Greek, Dutch, Spanish, and more.
I know the United Kingdom has been a royal asshat throughout the centuries but the mark of Europe is intense and undeniable; without Europe, there is no such thing as the English language
(except perhaps a number of proper nouns that are rooted in the Celtic people and their ancestors)[Edit: see crappywittyname’s comment below].I hope our European siblings can find solace in the fact that “English” is a distinctly European language that is full of words from all of our tongues.
The Celtic languages are closely related to European languages such as Breton, the ancestor languages having been developed and spoken widely in Europe pre-Roman conquest.
I’m only being picky because it adds even more support to your (already very fine) argument. You don’t even need that caveat.
let’s all switch to Sumerian.
We would be the badass of the world.
English is mostly used in commercial now, changing it would be costly and you would need the commitment of many others people to accept a new change in how to approach the world or just Europe, it’s a tipe of commitment I doubt people would be willingly to accept.
It’s not possible to please everybody so I vote for Basque and pleasing nobody.
Came here to say that. I intended to propose an immensely complex language that almost nobody understands and that is unrelated to any other family of languages. My choice was Hungarian or Finnish but Euskadi (aka “Basque”) clearly beats it. I had the privilege to learn some words from Basque coworker years ago when I was living in Spain for a while and I swear it is so utterly alien to anything I’ve heard, that it must be of extraterrestrial origin.
Albanian would also fit your criteria as it’s also completely different from everything else and fucking strange at the same time.
Basque might be the most neutral language of them all, right? Does it have a connection with any other European language?
Furthermore it’s the only European language there is. Every other language spoken in Europe descends from the Eurasian steppe. Well, most likely with a pinch of Kaukasian. It’s several millennia overdue that we honour the Euskari!
Basque it is!
Nope. Basque is considered a language isolate, not related to any other language.
Nope, it’s an isolate.
English is a global lingua franca, not just european. And it’s not just because of the american and british influence, but because it’s a relatively easy language.
Also the translator programs are better and better, this is actually a good and fitting usecase of current LLMs. I think we are not far away from the babel fish.
but because it’s a relatively easy language
I literally cried learning English as a kid lol
Now try to learn Portuguese, or German, or Russian. English has wonky phonetics, but has a relatively simple grammar. As a bonus it’s not properly standardized, so whatever you come up with is going to be correct in at least one of the existing dialects.
As someone who learnt both German and English as a second language, German was easier.
Consistent spelling and pronounciation make a massive difference.
It’s horrible how many German nouns have a female or male gender. Like a lamp is female for some reason, but not if it’s a spot or a chandelier or whatever. This is so stupid and has to be memorized. Why is a bottle female, but not if it’s a flat flask.
… and French is even more silly.
It’s called “grammatical gender”. The gender is of the word not what the word represents. It evolved in many different languages meaning it did so for a reason. My guess is that it started with good intentions as many things do have a sex. However, realization crept in that there are far more things on this planet without a sex (or even an identifiable one) and something had to be done. Probably it didn’t sound good either.
There are also languages where the concept of gender (not just grammatical gender, but gender itself) doesn’t exist and they have no gendered pronouns (everyone and everything is an “it” --> “the man, it moved”, “the woman, it sang”, …).
Languages are fascinating from a purely theoretical standpoint.
It even existed in Old and Middle english, upto the 1500s.
Some nouns still have genders in english. But this is more an exception than a rule. Ie. a ship/boat is female (called “she”), while nature is also feminine (often personified as “Mother nature”).
Consistent spelling and pronunciations but even native speakers get pronouns for certain nouns wrong sometimes.
And as for German being consistent there are still situations like Umfahren (Drive around) and Umfahren (Run over) that are written the same but pronounced different.
Plus English has influences from everywhere. In my oral abitur exam, I got stuck once or twice and made up words by anglicizing the pronounciantion of french words gaining extra points and impressed faces.
That works for almost all European languages. In one of his books Richard Feynman tells a story about when he went to Brazil and didn’t how to say “so” in Portuguese so he used “Consequentemente” by adapting Consequently and everyone was impressed with his fluency.
I feel like that’s just a tall tale that Feynman told the author, like most of those stories
The grammar is fairly simple, but spelling is a total train wreck and an unparalleled nightmare of inconsistencies and convoluted rules. As long as you don’t have to read or write anything, there’s not much to cry about.
Me too, but later I learned a bit of german and latin. The thing is you can fake english easily, like “why use lot word when few do trick” is a totally understandable sentence. Word order is not as stict as in german, no cases, no grammatical genders, verb tenses are mostly optional. Pronunciation is messed up though.
Yeah, English Grammer is basically just Germanic (not to be confused with the Germanic language German, which is just another Germanic language, not the origin). Our words though are not. Most of the words that make up most of our sentences are still their Germanic versions, but talking about specific things could use words from dozens of languages. This makes pronunciation really challenging, because you can’t just know the origin from looking at it, and even if you can it might have shifted from that.
No language is inherently easy to learn. Whether a language is easy to learn depends on how close it is to the languages you already know, thus to a Dutchman it will be much easier to learn English than to a Russian or a Thai. It is true that learning English is made a lot easier by having such a huge media presence, meaning it’s very easy to immerse yourself even without living in an English-speaking country.
As a Dutchman living in Germany I can attest to the immense difference that dubbing makes. While even young children in the Netherlands consume tons of English language media and have done so for decades, their peers in Germany generally get only dubbed versions. This leads to a lackluster immersion when “properly” learning English.
Yeah, I’m also Dutch and watch German television often, and I always think it’s odd that all foreign movies have been dubbed over. In the Netherlands, that only happens to movies for children who can’t read yet. I think it’s a bit of a shame too, as I like to hear different languages.
That may not be entirely true. Some studies have shown that Danish children generally take longer to learn to talk than children from other Scandinavian countries, which are incredibly similar in most other aspects. The leading hypothesis is the complicated phonology is to blame.
Popular science article in Danish, summing up the several studies
The researchers themselves however also make the valid point that
Complexity in language, however, is a difficult size [standard, I presume]. For although Danish is difficult in pronunciation, it is grammatical, for example, much simpler than German and Finnish, which in turn is easier to understand than Danish.
But I was speaking in general terms, anyway. Language, being a natural phenomenon, of course has lots of variation.
I HATE the idea that we would have some Kind of built into us translators. Languages are a crucial part of human development and, therefore, they should be learned in school the old way. (Ofc school must also evolve)
it’s a relatively easy language
I don’t know about that part. The orthography at least is wild.
Every ‘real’ languare has wild parts. there are constructed languares that don’t but if they became common wild parts will likely be added over time.
Yep. I always liked the idea of a conlang, but there’s nothing stopping language change with them.
No, most people are pragmatic in this case and eastern countries changed from Russian ~30 years ago so another change isn’t coming any time soon.
As my parents saw the change from “it is really appreciated that you can speak English” to “it is expected that you can use it”. I can tell that it is so engrained in our multinational exchange that it won’t be even desirable.
Would be great to switch to mandarin. /s for all you humourless.
But what instead? Spanish? German? Esperanto?
I root for Spanish! Creating a bridge with my Latino friends and thus upsetting the US at the same time.
Esperanto is a nice variant: it is much more adequate that any of those chaotically evolved “natural” languages plus nobody would have an unfair advantage just because of being lucky to be born in the English speaking country.
I like the idea. My only issue with esperanto are its heavy influence by romance languages
A substantial majority of its vocabulary (approximately 80%) derives from Romance languages, but it also contains elements derived from Germanic, Greek, and Slavic languages
That gives Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Romania, and probably a few other countries quite a leg up. But, with influence from other languages, it would probably diversify its vocabulary (at least I hope so).
Almost all languages have a very big number of words derived from Latin or French. For example Polish, which is a slavic language, has so many of Latin or French rooted words.
Esperanto apart, I think that German should be the language od Europe, because is it simply the biggest language of the EU. It is also precise. Ofc it could get simplified, because for many der/die/das is too complicated or it is too much of a hustle to remember. German could get more logical with them and then it should be no problem for everyone.
We could also think about regianal lingua-francas. For example, it could be this way that in the region of romance languages, everyone would speak French, in the region of germanic - German and in the region of slavic - Polish. Simply the biggest languages in a given region.
The funniest one but also kind of interesting would be Latin. #useLatin
Latino sine flexione was an interesting proposition.
English is Germanic, so it’s a pointless change. Latin would be cool I guess, but English is mostly derived from it anyway, just simplified.
English isn’t going anywhere. It’s too embedded now.
English isn’t going anywhere. It’s too embedded now.
That’s what French was until the second world war changed everything.
Look at how we are communicating. This is why it won’t change again. The world wasnt connected like it is now.
Never say never. Many things can change. English became the lingua franca in a single generation. Someone born in the 50s is old enough to remember a different lingua franca.
The US could align itself with Russia and create such animosity that people not only eschew its products but also the language. Right-wingers could get so much power and become so radical that they demand English be abolished as it tarnishes their own language. China could swoop in, nuke Western powers, and establish a new world order with Mandarin as the world language. An unexpected geological event could pollute the skies and seas in and around Europe, force massive emigration to Africa and Asia, and African governments could unite to declare Arabic, Swahili, and Zulu as the main languages of Africa for all to learn. Brain to computer interfaces might become so widespread that an intermediate and more practical, universal brainwave language is used instead of English (see Gibberlink for inspiration).
Yeah, of course, not impossible, but we won’t change from it just because. There would have to be a real reason, like as you say, crazy technology advancements or an insane apocalypse makes its widespread use die out.
People have never been this connected, so it’s not going to change anywhere near as easily as it has in the past, is my point.
but English is mostly derived from it anyway
IMO English is more Germanic than Latin. There’s certainly a lot of latin/french loanwords, but that’s true for all other Germanic languages, too (even if to a somewhat lesser degree). Romance languages like French and Italian are actually derived from Latin and they are a lot different from English but fairly similar to each other (especially Italian, Spanish and Portuguese).
This is not such a big advantage because of the way words are constructed, by gluing words together. So there are fewer words to learn to have the same vocabulary.
Yes. It’s easy and already established. There is no reason to change it.
We will probably see another language become the lingua franca
That’s gonna take a while. Chinese is an unlikely candidate due to how difficult it is to learn to speak and especially read and write, despite the rising international influence of the Chinese state. And I rather doubt that Europe’s Germanic-speaking countries will stop using English as a lingua franca anytime soon, it’s just too easy to learn for them compared to any other possible candidate.
Let’s hope it’s not going to be Russian anytime soon.
Something like Esperanto would be a nice alternative for the EU, though. Maybe there’s other artificial languages that are even better? I’m not well-versed in this topic.
That’s gonna take a while
French was replaced within 60-80 years. Such change isn’t fast, unless forced. However, I don’t know how it could be forced. We aren’t in a feudalistic system anymore and EU interests are heavily influenced by an English-speaking upper class.
And I rather doubt that Europe’s Germanic-speaking countries will stop using English as a lingua franca anytime soon, it’s just too easy to learn for them compared to any other possible candidate.
Try this.
Let’s hope it’s not going to be Russian anytime soon.
One can only hope, not only because of the implications, but also because the language is very complicated IMO. Their case system is horrific.
Their case system is horrific.
More so than German?
Depends. They have six cases, which is standard for a lot of indogermanic languages, and their declension is mostly consistent. I never learned German as L2, but I imagine the fact that in German cases are not clearly marked on the noun but by the combination of article and noun and that we use two different but very similar marking systems depending on context as utter nightmarish for L2 learners.
English is good for the reasons pointed out. Also: It’s no language of the EU (at least for now) so no country gets an edge over the others which should be considered too. (I’m a native German speaker)
It’s no language of the EU (at least for now)
Ireland.
True! Obviously forgot. At least quite a small proportion. And English is just one of the two official languages.
At least quite a small proportion. And English is just one of the two official languages.
Oh right, Malta too :)
Ireland?
