English has definitely become the lingua franca of the world. I was appalled at the ability of the participants at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest to speak not only very good English but current everyday, infomal, even colloquial English. (Unlike like my still formal and rather stilted French.)
Gone was the dual English/French repetition of every statement by the the hosts (although the scoring remains bilingual). Most countries sang in English and those who did not sang in their native lingo. The only real clanger was Latvia whose entry only served to prove that Google translator is not foolproof:
“What for how we live? Only Mr God knows why.”
However, there was a visible difference between those who spoke English comfortably and those for whom it is definitely a secondary – as opposed to a second – language. In general, the further west the competitor’s country, the greater their command of the language and consequently the further east the country the less comfortable the competitor appeared to be with the language.
I suspect that the degree of facility with English displayed by a country’s entrants reflects the amount of trade the country maintains with the anglophone world – by which I mean the United States. Perhaps it is the influence of NATO membership.
Cultural Imperialism at Work
One feature of the colloquial English spoken was that it is very American. The expressions used, while common everywhere, have their origins in the US and, more to the point, on US television. As disturbing as this is in itself, it shows the degree to which that which passes for culture in the US has penetrated the continent of true western culture. I know from personal experience that I can always find topics of conversation with foreign language speakers in foreign languages by talking about ER, Supernatural and CSI.
To achieve this position of prominence, all it took was the gun-boat diplomacy of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, two world wars and 50 years if the threat of nuclear annihilation. So simple, anyone could do it.
I’m also not quite sure why I’m complaining about this. To my mind, as an overly educated yobbo, English is without doubt the greatest and best language in the universe and represents the highest of humanity’s achievement since the invention of fire. I guess I fear the loss of diversity. Learning other languages opens up whole new vistas on reality, different ways of looking at the world, and alternative point of view on both the common and the extraordinary. Living in a world of one language or even of a single predominant language is a terrifyingly shallow prospect.
Previous linguae francae include:
- French for diplomacy in the seventeenth century and in the realms of literature and culture off and on since the 1400s;
- Italian and German vied for dominance in the political sphere during the Holy Roman Empire (say AD 1200-1600);
- French, or more accurately Frankish (the original lingua franca) from about AD 700-1100;
- Medieval or Neo-Latin complicates this picture by remaining the language of the Church, science and education from the end of the Roman Empire until even Hungary dropped it as an official language in 1867;
- Greek and after it Latin from about the fifth century BC until the fifth century AD.
Alternative linguae francae of today include:
- Russian throughout much of Central Asia;
- Spanish in the Americas;
- Arabic is the common language of the Middle East;
- Portuguese, Italian and French in different parts of Africa;
- Italian is in the process of replacing Latin as the official language of the Vatican.
Only recently has Mandarin Chinese replaced Cantonese as the language of modern China and the Chinese ex-pat communities due to that country’s continued economic rise to power. Mandarin or Standard Chinese is my pick for the next lingua franca after the eventual demise from this position of English sometime in the far, far future.
A lingua franca is clearly a basic necessity for international communication. But does it have to be English?
I’m surprised to see no mention of Esperanto here. I’d like to see wider use made of Esperanto for this purpose. Esperanto was designed to be simple and regular; English was not.
I’m afraid I don’t have anything good to say about Esperanto – except that it is the common language in Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat novels.
Yes, it was designed to be easy to learn and use but it’s not. It’s full of rules and exceptions just as arbitrary as the languages it seeks to replace/augment, it’s very euro-centric and even most Esperantists cannot speak it well enough to be considered fluent by any measure you care to name. (Klingon actually beats it in terms of both number of speakers and average degree of fluency.)
Like all constructed languages such as Volapuk, Interlingua, Anglic, etc, it is a noble endeavour which has resulted in nothing but fail.
I am not certain where you received the information that Esperanto has “failed” ; in fact no-one can predict the future 🙂
During a short period of 122 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA World factbook. It is the 22nd most used language in Wikipedia, ahead of Danish and Arabic. It is a language choice of Google, Skype, Firefox and Facebook.
Native Esperanto speakers, (people who have used the language from birth), include financier George Soros, World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to NATO and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet.
Your readers may be interested in the following video. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670
A glimpse of the language can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
First off, let me say I appreciate your advocacy of esperanto and I admire you for learning another language. I encourage everyone to learn another language or two or three.
I can’t agree with your statistics.
There’s no info on the CIA World Factbook about esperanto. The language is not listed on the languages page at all (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2098.html). In fact, it’s not listed in the Ethnologue table of 172 languages of more than three million speakers (http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size) which includes such minor languages as Tsonga (South Africa), Aceh (Indonesian) and Jamaican Creole English (Jamaica). Therefore, it is cannot be listed in the top 100 languages.
The idea that it is the 22nd most used language on Wikipedia says more about Wikipedia and its users than it does about esperanto or the state of any current lingua franca.
The EU’s only concern about esperanto is avoiding the complaint made against it for language discrimination by the Universala Esperanto-Asocio (http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=EO/04/13&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en). The current EU policy is “Mother Tongue Plus Two: – that is that every EU citizen should learn two languages to at least a basic conversational level as well as their native language.
This is a policy I can support (or could support, if I were a citizen of the EU).