Quenitin Shaw (Guardian Letters) makes a simple but powerful point about one of the reasons behind the domination of English as the world's shared second language or 'lingua franca';
English is easy to speak badly but still conveys an approximation of meaning - its flexibility and tolerance for formal errors is its strength.
Its a simple point, well-made & makes simple sense of a global phenomena
not mutually exclusive, of course....
@mxtthxw @ChrisMayLA6
Yeah it sounds like a bit of a just-so story to me. There's nothing special about English that makes it a particularly good lingua franca. By and large the countries colonised by Spain speak Spanish, and the countries colonised by Britain speak English. One or two of those happen to have become economically significant on the back of all that theft, genocide and slavery, so English became more globally useful.
It's a badge of shame really.
hmmm.... surely the point is not those countries/populations that speak a 'lingua franca' as their primary language but the range of populations that have it as a second language for communication with non first language speakers?
@ChrisMayLA6 @mxtthxw
The number of countries that had it forced on them is one factor, the economic importance of some of those countries is another. I'm sceptical that there's any linguistic explanation, is all.
The various peoples speaking South American languages didn't adopt English as a second language, nor the peoples in Russia speaking various Uralic and Turkic languages. They used the second language of whichever empire absorbed them, same as southern Europe did.
Hmmm... what I have concluded from the debates about this post over the last day, is that the structural and linguistic issues are interweaved.... so I'm not as sceptical as you on the linguistic explanation, but neither am I dismissive of the political economic factors that had a powerful role in adoption
@ChrisMayLA6
So to put that in computer science terms I can understand:
English isn't formal, like Pascal or Fortran, but is ... Basic.
@ChrisMayLA6 That's very questionable. Latin was the lingua franca in Europe for a long time and it cannot be said it is easy and forgiving. For both english and latin, the real reason for dominance is the power of one country/organisation (the USA, the christian church).
(See also arabic in the muslim world for another example where dominance has nothing to do with the characteristics of the language.)
yes, I'd agree that even if the ease/tolerence for mistakes issue is true, without the political structures of domination, no-one would be using English.... but its persistence in the face of a long ago decline of the UK, and the (perhaps) slow decline of US influence, may bring the utility issue to the fore?
^^^
> Quentin Shaw monstras simplan sed povan fakton pri kial la angla hegemoniis kiel la unversala "dua lingvo" aŭ "lingua franca" -
>
> La angla estas facila por "paroli malbone" sed ankoraŭ donas "proksimumecon" de sinifo - ĝia fleksebleco kaj toleremo al eraroj de formo estas ĝia forto.
---
Jes certe, sed la ekonomia kaj politika hegemonio de Brito kaj Usono ne malhelpas.....
There's a lot of discussion in the replies to the original post... you may find that of some interest?
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