why english is the world's
LINGUA FRANCA
by
ROBERT J. LEWIS
____________________________________________________
England and America are two countries
separated by the same language.
George Bernard Shaw
All Indo-European languages have the capacity to form compounds.
Indeed, German and Dutch do it, one might say, to excess.
But
English does it more neatly than most other languages,
eschewing
the choking word chains that bedevil other Germanic languages
and employing the nifty refinement of making the elements reversible,
so that we can distinguish between a houseboat and a boathouse,
between basketwork and a workbasket, between a casebook
and a
bookcase. Other languages lack this facility.
Bill Bryson
In the
spirit of a disinterested accounting for the dominion, the global
hegemony of the English language, it was a common belief, especially
among colonized or conquered peoples, that the predominance was
a consequence of at first British Imperial power and then American,
that if another nation, such as Germany, had come to world domination,
its language would have become the world’s lingua franca.
This clean-cut but erroneous conclusion speaks to the over-appreciation
of the cause and effect that underlies all historical change and
the inveterate under-estimation of the role human nature plays
in determining not only what language best lends itself to universality,
but human behaviour in general.
If Ireland,
population five million, a country of inconsequential power and
prestige, were the only English speaking country in the world,
English would still emerge as the world’s primary language
of communication -- that is the second language of all non-English
speaking nations -- for reasons which are as unvarying as they
are proper to the species, in particular the propensity for human
beings to seek out and take the path of least resistance when
it is available. This is especially observable in the human response
to the effort required to perform any given task in contrast to
the effort expended, when the latter offers a choice of ‘less
than’ in respect to customary expenditure. In negotiating
the limited time available between home and getting to the workplace,
we will choose biking over walking, driving over biking. In the
supply of heavy materials for home construction, we will opt for
mechanical conveyances over human agency.
In
the near future, China is expected to emerge as the world’s
next superpower, but despite its 1.4 billion inhabitants, English
will still remain the international language of governance and
instruction. It is hardly an accident of history that India, a
country comprised of 29 states and 22 major languages (720 dialects),
uses English, the mother tongue of its reviled former colonizer,
for governance, and national and international commerce.
Since
there is no circumventing the long-term drudgery the learning
of any language entails, the language that best facilitates the
learning process will immediately recommend itself, just as recalcitrant
languages (Czech, Hungarian, Turkish) will be strictly limited
to those for whom it is their mother tongue. We must bear in mind
that 5-year-olds, who are naturally disposed to learning, require
between two and three years to learn a new language. Rare indeed
and in deed – with the exception of English learners --
is the person over 30 who is able to master a second language.
I, for one, look forward to the day when an Elon
Musk patented micro-chip can be welded to my flabby
(under-performing) neo-cortex, and with a simple cerebral impulse-command,
I’ll be proficient in whatever language circumstance prescribes.
There
isn’t a person who wouldn’t rather be proficient than
not in whatever task is set before him. Who wouldn’t rather
make fewer than more mistakes? We revere, pay top dollar to those
exceptional persons who make the fewest mistakes in their field
of endeavor: the world’s best athletes, ballet dancers,
classical musicians, actors. With the exception of those individuals
whose psychological make-up or socio-economic standing have rendered
them self-annulling – prone to, at one extreme, apathy or
the other extreme, anarchy -- each of us, according to ability
and inclination, strives for perfection, a fugitive goal that
all human beings are condemned to pursue asymptotically.
As it
concerns the learning of a language and the meta-objective of
attaining perfection, or less than that, the more modest goal
of making the least number of mistakes in one’s second or
third language, where both objectives are subsumed by human nature
that bids us to ease the pain associated with the protracted learning
process, we will congregate around the language that provides
the most efficient result in respect to time and effort expended.
In our time, which hasn’t yet taken into account the proficiency
of the many new digital languages that are operating just below
the surface of computation based technology, the language that
best facilitates learning is incontestably English, especially
basic English upon which international communication and commerce
depend.
Among
the many reasons why English is easier to learn than all other
languages are:
(1)
no masculine or feminine (or neuter) nouns, participles/gerunds
(2) no declensions (distinguishing noun as direct or indirect
object of verb, possessive, nominative).
(3) conjugations (especially in the present) are facile compared
to other languages
(4) English requires fewer words than the Latin languages, or
German, to express the same thought
(5) In any given sentence there are more non-variables in English
(words that stay the same regardless of usage) than other languages.
(6) There are no number inflections for adjectives, articles and
adverbs.
In English,
“the blue book” will always be the blue book.
In all
the major languages except English, in a typical sentence of 15-20
words, at every 3rd or 4th word, the speaker has to consider choices
in respect to verb endings, direct and indirect objects, noun
and verb modifiers, all of which are gender sensitive. In Turkish,
an agglutinative language, a single noun can carry as many as
six suffixes. In other words, since English has more non-variables
per sentence than all other languages, the learner will make fewer
mistakes than the learner of German, for example. In the efficiency
rating category, measured by significant content divided by the
number of syllables, English is the most efficient language.
In respect
to the all-important ear - - if you don’t catch it you lose
it -- English is the easiest tongue to assimilate because it is
the slowest spoken language in the world after Mandarin and German.
Spanish is spoken 33% faster than English, on top of which it
is a vowel based language, meaning that its (torrential) flow
is unbroken making it more difficult to isolate individual words.
German and English, consonant based languages, are full of stops,
which allow the ear to identify words and phrases heard for the
first time.
Verb
conjugation is famously simple in English, with only the 3rd person
singular changing in the simple present. (I go, you go, he goes,
we go, you go, they go). In French the ending of the verb changes
according to the person and number (singular, plural: Je vais,
tu vas, il/elle va, nous allons, vous allez, ils vont). In English
there is one change, in French there are six. The same relative
simplicity holds for compound verbs. Sentences that require two
or three verbs are demonstratively more unwieldy in non-English
languages. Unlike Spanish and French, subjunctive mood tenses
are rarely used in English.
In English
verbs, the infinitive reveals the form of the conjugation in the
simple present: 'to go,' 'to see,' become 'I go,' 'I see.' In
French the infinitive aller (to go) becomes je vais.
In Spanish ir (to go) becomes yo voy. In Spanish
there are two verbs ‘to be;’ in French there are two
verbs ‘to know.’ In Turkish there is no verb 'to be'
or 'to have.'
And while
it is true that there are almost no verb conjugations in many
of the Asian tongues, they are tonal languages and their scripts
and long alphabets preclude their suitability as convenient second
languages.
In respect
to the all-important learning curve, it is always easier to transition
from the complex to the simple than the other way around. It is
easier to manage an alphabet comprised of 26 compared to 50 letters,
or to deal with 50 grammar points than a 100.
Native
English speakers have been singled out (mocked and derided) for
being unable to learn second and third languages. However misleadingly
true, it has nothing to do with innate ability. If I’m used
to solving quadratic equations, I will find the learning of multiplication
and division facile by comparison. For mother tongue English speakers,
all other languages are more complex and thus, exponentially more
difficult to learn.
If we
now agree that English, compared to all other languages, best
lends itself to universality, it should be noted that this consensus
is not strictly an outcome of ergonomics, but also human nature
that serves but one master: the path of least resistance. Notwithstanding
that strategic location, specialized industry and technology may
require of a workforce that it become proficient in second languages
other than English, in most international arenas (UN, WHO, NATO,
NAFTA) English is the medium that best facilitates the discourse
that animates difference of opinion, while providing the best
lexical materials for the construction of bridges that link unlike
cultures so that watchful and wary strangers may become better
acquainted.
COMMENTS
from apscis/reddit
I don’t buy the strange claim that English would be the
global lingua franca even if it was only spoken in Ireland (in
addition to England, I guess?). It’s not like the greater
world would seek out the best lingua franca and unanimously
agree upon English. And what of, say, Russian, which is complicated
by pretty much every standard put forth here, but is a lingua
franca across swathes of Central Asia and the Caucasus? Why
are these people not using the supposedly much simpler English?
Because Russia was a major power in that region, and England
was not.
from SwankyPanda123/reddit
Hate to break it to you, but English is the lingua frnca cuz
of centuries of colonialism around the world and the US being
a superpower, not cuz it’s easy to learn. India doesn’t
use english because they think it’s easy, they use it
cuz of years of British rule.Also, if people chose lingua francas
based on easiness, esperanto would’ve dominated the world.I
get the feeling from this article that you don’t know
much about languages or linguistics. Also, I forgot to mention
that written English is stupidly complicated. Languages that
have consistent phonetics with their alphabets are way waaaay
easier even if they have slightly more letters.
Hindi is already the lingua franca in north India,
in that region, there’s no competition. However, the only
thing keeping hindi from being a lingua franca across all of
India is that many south Indians see the language as foreign
to them, which makes sense when you think about it. Although
all indic languages were influenced by Sanskrit, south Indians
speak dravidian languages which is a completely different language
family than the indo-european languages of the north, which
share high mutual intelligibility. And most importantly, the
south didn’t have that much imposition of the Hindi language,
english on the other hand was imposed for 100s of years by the
british as the “prestigious” language. That imposed
mindset is what makes english the current indian lingua franca.
Also, for any Indian, Hindi is an easier second
language to learn than english by far. Hindi shares more vocabulary
and grammar structures with all indic languages (even dravidian)
than english.
ThomasLikesCookies /reddit
Some of the claims there are just false. For instance, English
doesn't actually require fewer words to express the same thoughts
as German, but about 20% more.
also by Robert J. Lewis:
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