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Old 14-05-2006, 17:39   #15
haku haku is offline
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Join Date: May 2003
Location: Normandie
Age: 54
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Posts: 7,839

There has been several lingua francas during human history, it's a political and economical need, and the 'chosen' language is always the language of a dominant power.

The reason of English dominance is no different. It was first spread by the expansion of British colonization, at its peak the British Empire ruled one third of the planet and English was the de facto official language. And when the power of the British Empire faded into the dust of history, it was replaced by the rising power of the USA, reinforcing even further the dominance of English.

The problem is that lingua francas are not only a communication tool, they are also a tool of cultural opression (a blatant example of that would be the eurovision contest people are talking about in another thread, almost all entries are in English regardless of the country they represent and that's just pathetic) but it's nothing new, it's been constantly happening in human history.


However, i disagree with some of the people above, English is by far the simplest language of the Indo-European familly. Indo-European languages are very complex highly synthetic languages (meaning that words are highly inflected, which is always very difficult to learn for a non-native), but English is a remarkable exception. English used to be highly synthetic as well, but in the last thousand years, it has evolved in an absolutely unique fashion losing one by one almost *all* its inflections and becoming more and more analytic (no other Indo-European language has evolved in such a radical way). English is now almost entirely analytic (meaning that words are mostly invariable, which is much easier to learn for a non-native), almost as analytic as Chinese (which is fully analytic) and many linguists think that English will indeed become fully analytic at some point in the future.
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