Friday, August 26, 2011

Lingua Franca? Nope

This article in New Geography summarizes what has been obvious for the last 20-30 years - French is dying as an international language. English is becoming the language the world deals in, trades in, and communicates across boundaries in.

Most of the world's scientific journals are written in English, which is also the language of international aviation and international business. Many former colonies have retained English as the only language widely spoken across many tribes or peoples.

English has a simple structure but a huge vocabulary. The other DrC and I joke that in a generation or two the whole world will speak broken, heavily accented English, perhaps in addition to a birth language.