Europe

G'day from Australia, please don't cut our borderless monolingual Island off. Kiwi's probably feel similar too.

The Lingua Franca didn't change because someone decided to change it, it slowly happened. You could argue it would be nice for EU if the (local) Lingua Franca would be the language of a large member state, but I don't see it happening by force. Probably better to just leave it to be English, even if the Irish are the only native speakers in the EU.

English if we want ease of communication (and is the most likely path forward)

Esperanto if the goal is to teach it to a whole generation: it is designed to be easy to understand when you already know one European language (especially a latin one I think?)

Chinese if the goal is to speak the language of the dominant non European power in the next century

Anything but english or french. Yes, I'm willing to put up even with brainfuck as a spoken language

Logical thinking I would think English should stay. It is by far the most known foreign language in Europe.

Lojban! Though esperanto maybe is more reasonable.

Question is, what should be the criteria for deciding which other language?

If it is for the sake of current global usability, English remains top.

If it is for geostrategic considerations, Spanish, French and Arabic would be the languages to cover South and Central America, large parts of Africa and West Asia.

If it is for population dominance inside the EU, it would be German, which probably will ruffle some feathers. If it is for population dominance in Europe, it should be Russian, which will ruffle a lot of feathers.

I'm too lazy to learn another language. Pick from English and Polish, alright?

A lingua franca isn't controllable. French was the lingua franca as it had been the dominant language of trade. Then the British Empire and later USA emerged and dominated global trade, and it became the lingua franca through shear necessity.

In the tech age, English has also become the lingua franca which is likely to cement it's position into the future. In Europe, it's been a convenient second language for many as it allowed Europeans to compete in global trade and also talk to each other with 1 common language, also avoiding nationalist concerns around language. English has also been less controversial as a second language than everyone learning French or German for example given the history of previous european wars.

A language isn't owned by any country, so it doesn't matter that the US is going crazy or that the UK left the EU. English is likely to stay the lingua franca in the west and in Europe as so many people already speak it, it's already well established in schools and culture and in all honesty there isn't an obvious alternative.

In terms of economics, China is powerful but Chinese is spoken largely by one country, and is hard for Europeans to learn due to how fundamentally different it is. India is emerging as an economy, with English it's own lingua franca in a continent divided by numerous languages. Urdu is being pushed by the hindu nationalist government but the global reality is that speaking english is a strength for Indian citizens in trade and global work place, so it's unlikely people will stop learning and speaking English in India in the foreseeable future.

The only other viable alternative in global terms currently for Europe would be Spanish due to the shear number of native speakers. But the problem remains that most Europeans don't speak Spanish and while there is a large number of spanish speakers, they are heavily concentrated in the Americas. Meanwhile English is already spoken widely in Europe, North America outside of Mexico, India, and many other former British Colonies including widely in Africa, Oceania and across Asia.

It's certainly possible things may change, but at the moment it seems unlikely. We're not seeing a huge trend of people moving away from English. One possibility though is that translation apps become near instantaneous and people move away from learning any 2nd language. However I personally think that is unlikely as a translation app can never be perfectly instantaneous due to the nature of grammer - you need the whole of a sentence to translate into another language with a totally different sentence structure, especially for longer and more complex sentences.

So I think it's unlikely English will be displaced as the lingua franca. It is also unneeded - it benefits Europe that a European language is the lingua franca (regardless of the UK exiting the EU etc), and it also benefits Europe as so many Europeans speak English - so the best thing for Europe is to help spread English, and offer a different influence and culture from the US with other English speakers particuarly in emerging economies. English can be Europe's trojan horse for sharing it's culture and values.

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?

English has a blend of Germanic and Romantic features, which is nice for Europe, and no inflections to memorise, which is nice in addition. You could also argue that no grammatical gender is a positive feature.

On the downside, the orthography is ass, so maybe there should be a new EU-standard fonetik version. The contractions are confusing. A non-native speaker can maybe add some more, but that's all I've heard about.

@atro_city I remember a few years ago there was a French far-right group or something that proposed Latin to be the lingua franca instead, lol. But I haven't heard anything since.

Isn't the new official EU language irish English? I speak english with heavy german accent, can this be the ligua franca?

It's because of the network effect. If you only know your local language and want to unlock speaking to the rest of the world when learning English gets you pretty far.

A lot of people start learning English because a lot of people speak English. Since now Europe, North America, half of Africa, Middle East, South Asia, Latin America, Oceania speak English to some extent that I know of.

It's absolutely bonkers how far English has gotten in one generation so learning anything else as a second language is pretty weird.

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.

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.

It’s not possible to please everybody so I vote for Basque and pleasing nobody.

Latinam magnam iterum faciamus. 😎 🥂 🧐