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.
English as a Lingua Franca
I bet frenchies are so salty about it
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.
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”.
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
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).
Right now there is no reason to believe that will change but we cannot predict the future. Thus far no language has remained the common one permanently.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s what? Talk about a cliff hanger! 😳
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)?
Dude, I get it, but I don’t have anything against you and I’m not demanding you learn English to cater to me.
Please stop assuming I’m racist or selfish for only knowing the language my parents spoke most when I was a baby, I probably could have picked up Spanish from my mom’s family but sending a teenager with Asperger’s like me to stay with relatives in South America in 2007 like my normal-brained brother did as a foreign exchange student would have been infeasible.
I just want to write speculative fiction in my own language and in return be grateful to people who are willing to learn a trade language, not be told I’m a monster just for speaking only a language that’s commonplace, is that too much to ask?
All is good, no need to change one’s self to conform to what others think. All we can do is keep on trying to learn.
The meme was meant to be taken as a joke, while being a bit smug.
The title mentions programming languages, so as to widen the pool; Lemmy seems to have many that would fall under that category.
Culture wars and identity politics are just tools used to divide.
We shall come together to battle the wealthy class, as the gods have foretold.
Good luck, mate!
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Sprich Deutsch, du elendiger Englisch sprechender Hurensohn!
No. Get over the fact that English is the common speech of the world. And be grateful you even can learn new languages; not all of us can.
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That’s inebriated pachyderms to you. And no, I won’t. Take the retarded anti-America bashing elsewhere; our country is in crisis right now and we don’t need to hear it.
And that’s all this post is, petty assholes taking advantage of the fact we’re destabilizing to needle us over stupid shit that doesn’t matter, as if we’re the only country on Earth whose members are primarily monolingual. That’s blatantly racist shit.
Also nice post history, I see you’re ready and willing to attack anyone who disagrees with you. Blocked.
Oh holy shit, the hypocrisy here is mind-blowing. Do you see what you just did right there? That kind of useless personal attack, toward an abuse survivor who spent an evening arguing with rape apologists trying to twist that to seem petty so you can win something?
Going through my post history while trying to claim I am being aggressive, as if that were even a bad thing? 🤦 As if what you’re doing isn’t an aggressive attack on someone you disagree with? 🤦🤦🤦
That’s the kind of useless needling I’m talking about. This is why you need to grow up and find something better to do with your free time.
Jesus Christ. This guy is picking on rape survivors arguing because he’s angry at being called out on racist shit. 🤦 Next lifetime, I am going to demand to be reborn a squirrel. Or a chameleon. Not a stupid fucking human.
Many years ago, the common speech was French. The world of diplomacy and international mail was all French.
As someone who struggled for years learning that vile language, I’m glad we switched to English. It could have been German and its 16 different way to spell an article.
It’s not about you personally, more about the education system in some countries versus others.
That’s a fair assessment. Sorry if I was over-reactive.
No worries <3
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So people are monolingual?
Mostly only people from countries where English is the main language and even there, more and more are becoming bi- or even multilingual
Except India and every African country (with English as main language).
For a lot of african countries english and french are more administrative languages. More and more people learn them as they’re used in schools, but in everyday life other languages dominate. Calling them english speaking countries may be correct as english is the “official” language, but that’s not the whole picture.
Yeah, that’s my point.
I didn’t mean ALL countries with English as their main language but yeah, good point!
To cut Anglophones some slack, quite a lot of people are bilingual by knowing their native language + english because it’s pretty much the de facto international language, especially in Europe. For Anglophones it just happens that their native language is english, so they don’t bother with learning a new one since realistically they don’t need to, whereas for others knowing english is often mandatory for jobs.
Besides that it’s much easier to learn english than any other language because media and culture in english is unavoidable unless you live without internet and TV.
Regarding media, I can get almost anything I want in a dubbed or translated version, even some youtubers provide dubbed versions of their videos.
About that, why do Germans dub so much? Here we only dub children’s shows. Netflix has tried to dub a few normal movies and they got mocked by pretty much everyone.
I guess the immigrants appreciated it though. It’s probably a good way to learn our language.
I suppose there are two related reasons:
- older people (but also quite a lot of young people) don’t speak english that well, they would have problems understanding and dubbing has been done for so long that they expect it
- there are enough german speakers that it’s worth dubbing instead of just subtitling
Yeah, but what I meant is that for English you don’t need to look for it. You’ll see English on every social media. At least in Serbia, most, if not all popular foreign songs are in english, and most younger people listen to music with english lyrics, on TV you’ll find mostly american series, movies and shows, technology uses english by default, and everyone learns english in school here since year 1 of primary school.
My point is that Anlophones who want to learn, say, French, have to actively seek it out and motivate themselves for the sole purpose of being able to engage in French culture, while here (but I imagine it’s very similar in the rest of europe) people are bombarded with english everywhere they look, whether they want to or not.
And this reach really makes it insanely easy to learn english. I’ve been listening to so much Swedish metal that I’ve learned a handful of words, and if I had immediate access to Swedish like I do to English, I’d probably be talaring svenska by now, but I do not, so I don’t. So to make a fair comparisson, I’d say it would be better to see how many people speak 3+ languages, and compare that to the number of bilingual Anglophones.
Thank you for making your life revolve around mine🥰
Halt die Fresse, Bruder.
Nåh, det var da ikke noget problem. Nu skal du bare lære at tale dansk, tak.
Finns bättre språk än Danska att lära sig men du har rätt i sak
Ferme ta gueule.
Poderiamus colloquemor in latinam?
いいえ、日本語が話します。
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podero non collequemor in Sinam
Not Chinese lol
¡Me encanta este meme.!
J’aime ce moimoi!
Putain, donc meme devient moi-moi en français. Je viens juste de comprendre le truc. J’étais grave confus avant en lisant les coms.
Мне также нравится этот мем!
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Especialmente porque el tipo es un actor hispanohablante.
Pero con un acento fatal
●︎♓︎■︎◆︎⌧︎ ♓︎⬧︎ ⬧︎◆︎◻︎♏︎❒︎♓︎□︎❒︎
I speak English because I can’t learn other languages well. I’ve tried. I just am not hardwired for that sort of thing.
There is no hard wiring in the brain. It has plasticity, meaning it can adapt to new stimulus. Sure, learning a new language is easier for some than others, but that doesn’t mean you should give up.
I speak English because it’s the langauge I know the best.
My Aafrikans is nie goed nie.
Weón serán Weón
siempre hay un chileno
Hey I also know some American sign. We can totally write in that if you’d prefer.
I would love to learn plains sign language as well. You know, if I’m gonna live on this continent I should at least understand one of the languages.
You can learn Dine (Navajo) on Duolingo.
And I deeply appreciate it.
I learned Spanish in high school, but I never really had the opportunity to use it (grew up in a very insulated community where minorities weren’t exactly celebrated and ‘you’re in America speak English was a common sentiment) and lost it. I can still say ‘your mom smells like cheese when it’su see water’ and a few other things, but any semblance of conversational Spanish is gone.
I used to get mad at this meme because as an american we have a worse time in school learning other languages than europeans do. But I’ve dropped the shame and started spanish again from almost nothing. Maybe one day I’ll be fluent.
This. I appreciate everyone who has learned English, but more so than that I think having to learn it before moving to an English speaking country like mine is like expecting a baby to walk before it has been born. Take it from a half-Colombian who can’t understand a word of what my mom says on the phone to family members and friends, if you want someone to learn a language, the easiest way is complete immersion into a society that speaks it.
Worst of all is any asshole who, say, goes to Mexico and thinks “because I’m an American and we are nationally owed $$ by Mexico I am entitled to be so arrogant as to think people should have to speak English when I go to Mexico on vacation”. It’s not just America to Mexico obviously, I could say Quebecios to Western Canada or Englishman to (insert country here) or Chinese to (insert country here) but I’m sure you get the general formula. Arrogant wealthier-than-average tourist, different culture with less material wealth, inevitable offensively bigoted comment.
In such a case, I would absolutely tell the arrogant tourist that just because they’re rich and live in Nation X, does not make them entitled to being catered to, albeit with more colorful language because somehow idiots like that tend to realise they’ve gone too far and either apologize and stop or give one last angry quip and storm off to ragequit the conversation.
The meme feels too accusatory, but I understand that language-wise I got lucky and most people have to work up to knowing a language with critical user mass. I will never expect anyone to HAVE to speak my language for any reason.
I mean, with the specific caveat that if it’s an emergency and they know some English, ANY at all, we should probably go as far as we can to speak each other’s languages in a temporary pidgin until nobody is hurt or in danger. Aside from such time-sensitive situations, I’m definitely willing to learn from them as long as they acknowledge I hope they try to learn some English from me, but no obligation should be involved either way.
Cause no one uses pig latin anymore. Uckfay hetay olicepay
Esperanto estas la plej bona kaj utila internacia lingvo.
finfine mi trovas alian esperantiston 💚
toki pona
describe the difference between a sheep and a goat
soweli suwi / soweli kiwen xD
what if the speaker and the listener had different opinions on whether goats or sheep were ‘suwi’ ?
Tio ne estas tro grava problemo. se estas elekto inter ekzakte tiuj du, oni povas ech simple diri “la unua” kaj “la dua”. Neniu vera problemo.
vi ĝustas. mi tre ŝatas Tokiponon, sed ne taksas ĝin taŭga kiel internacia dua lingvo
You speak Esperanto because it’s the only language nobody knows.
Tio estas amuza; mi konas multajn en mia urbo.
Posso confermare Si sistema la cravatta
Niente cappello
