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English, ‘so to say’

English: the last lingua franca?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2012

Keith Davidson
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Extract

Among common speculations about the ultimate demise of English as the world's lingua franca (see Jeffrey Gil in ET 105, March 2011, reconsidering Chinese as a possible replacement) Nicholas Ostler (2010) is one more to project ‘the breakdown of English-speaking hegemony’, but his case is more curious than most. After an exhaustive, not to say exhausting, survey of ancient empires and modes of communication, in which Latin as the last lingua franca has but a late bit part, he arrives at an unrelated conclusion: ready machine translation sooner or later rendering a global ‘lingua-franca’ irrelevant (his hyphenation to legitimise an English plural – ‘lingua-francas’). Our springtime island-hopping pilgrimage rather gave the lie to this.

Type
Original Article
Information
English Today , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 58 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

Barbour, S. & Stevenson, P. 1990. Variation in German. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Crystal, D. 2010. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (3rd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ostler, N. 2010. The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel. London: Allen Lane, Penguin Books.Google Scholar