Do they also know C++ or Python?
Do they also know C++ or Python?
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Funny but English as a Lingua Franca is a thing. English has become a widely understood international language so its not just used to talk to native English speakers but also as a common language between non-native speakers.
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English as a Lingua Franca
I bet frenchies are so salty about it
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Italians (Latin) and Greeks were salty before them. And the Anglo-Saxons will be salty when Chinese, Indian or an African language becomes the new lingua franca. That's
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That's what? Talk about a cliff hanger! 😳
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Why would the lingua franca change again? No type of Chinese, Indian, nor any African language has even remotely the same spread as English does. I'd wager some proficiency in English exist in a sizeable part of the population in almost every country on earth, same can't be said for most other languages (if any).
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If history is anything to go by, the English speaking world runs into some trouble. Nothing much new comes out in English while somebody else becomes dominant in research and publishes in their language. That's getting picked up in academia and politics and if anyone wants to be up to date, they learn that language. The other language now starts to distribute their movies exposing more people who pick up that language and spreading from there.
Sure, that can take a few generations. It's not like everybody just decided to switch right now
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The thing is, we can't exactly go by history since we've never been as interconnected as we are now. Intercontinental travel could potentially be seen as "just" a huge step up in transportation compared to the past but the internet has fundamentally changed how we communicate. When it comes to technology and science, English is the de facto standard and it's gonna take something pretty huge to disrupt that.
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Disruptions are in the near future. Energy systems are changing, climate change is going to wreck things, wannabe dictators starting wars and others. Usually one of those isn't a problem but a lot of those at the same time wrecked past civilizations. But you can't predict how it'll all turn out.
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Yes, but the prerequisite is kind of that they will wreck the west (which is the main region keeping English as the lingua franca) but not the other regions when the west is likely going to be less impacted by a lot of issues than other parts of the world, for example just due to geography.
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Never in history though has there already been a language this dominant across the world, has there? I look at it this way, two things need to happen for a new language to become dominant -- there needs to be both an impetus and a strong candidate.
I'm not entirely sure what impetus there would be. What we've had so far is everyone else using the language. What would cause that to happen? You'd need a sizable number of people who simultaneously have global influence and don't typically use English. Right now one precludes the other. It's why there isn't a strong candidate either -- the language would need to have widespread use and honestly be the preferred language in some fields globally.
I can think of two possible candidates, but it's still a stretch. Latin is probably the most widely used, but no one uses it conversationally. Japanese goes along with your comment about movies -- the anime industry has been successful on a global level to the point that people prefer to listen to it in Japanese even if they don't understand it.
I think that's the bellwether we need to look for. Whatever the successor language is, it will need to be adopted by people who don't understand it but still prefer it. It faces the challenge of supplanting the dominant language for the entire globe, not just a region of the world.
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The term lingua franca derives from Mediterranean Lingua Franca (also known as Sabir), the pidgin language that people around the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean Sea used as the main language of commerce and diplomacy from late medieval times to the 18th century, most notably during the Renaissance era. During that period, a simplified version of mainly Italian in the eastern and Spanish in the western Mediterranean that incorporated many loan words from Greek, the Slavic languages, Arabic, and Turkish came to be widely used as the "lingua franca" of the region, although some scholars claim that the Mediterranean Lingua Franca was just poorly used Italian.
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I know. Joke is that frenchies see their language on the highest pedestal possible. And additional joke is in similarity of words "French" and "franca".
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Erm. English is the world language. In science and all international bodies. Why wouldn't we use English to communicate with people from other countries when not at least one person speaks the native language of the other (yes, that happens, and then we don't speak English)?
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165 comments