I was just wondering, who here is tired of English being the lingua franca, and who here likes the fact that English is the present lingua franca and does not want it to change?
For those of you who believe that the lingua franca should no longer be English, and believe that the language should change, what other language do you think would make a good lingua franca?
If I was a non-native English speaker, I would be pretty annoyed if I learned English thinking that it would be the lingua franca, and then everybody else decided to make it Chinese (unless of course I was Chinese :D).
The international lingua franca should be the one that the people around the world decide. It appears that English is their choice.
Ideally, I think that a good lingua france would be one that is relatively easy for the greatest number of people or countries to learn. So I think that English or any of the Romance languages are good options; they are also dominant in world affairs and have many native speakers. A language that has very few speakers and is very different from the dominant world languages like native american languages would be a poor choice, in my view.
I’m personally not annoyed that English is the main language but feel fortunate that my native tongue is English.
I don’t like that English is the lingua franca because I don’t like studying it. My mediocre ability as a native speaker is enough and I don’t feel like improving. I’d rather a foreign language be the lingua franca so that my speaking it would be impressive to some.
But that is just a story of my own oddity and vanity. English is probably the best candidate currently, and looks like it will remain so for some time.
If I were forming a country, I would probably pick two languages out of the UN. English and Mandarin would be the two official languages that are taught in school from kindergarten. I would include Mandarin because it is a lot easier reaching a native level with perfect pronunciation, grammar (especially prepositions), and vocabulary when you are a child, I think.
Switzerland has a pretty good system going on; their citizens tend to know Swiss German +French/Italian+English.