Anastasiya - for academic class

 

Is it too late for a new lingua franca?

English has become lingua franca or a universal language, and one of the main reasons that it is one of the most spoken languages in the world. Dominance of the language has been decided by the history of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Having a common language is useful in many aspects of our life. The situation of international relationships would be much worse if we did not have a global language to communicate. In this essay we will consider whether there is a possibility for a new lingua franca in the future, or whether the time for a new global language has passed.

First of all, before talking about that, I would like to introduce you to a lingua franca. The lingua franca is a language systematically used to make communication possible between people who speak different languages. How it has happened by history, our lingua franca is English. For reasons that there is a big influence of Western culture, economics and politics, also there is the rise of the British Empire in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The original lingua franca was a version of Italian incorporating elements of French, Spanish, Provencal, Greek, Arabic and Turkish, widely was spoken in the Mediterranean region. There are a lot of examples of lingua franca, and it exists on every continent, but the most obvious example today is English. Moreover, French was the language of European diplomacy from the 17^th century until the middle of the 20^th century. Thereby, here a question appears what would be nowadays if our lingua franca was changing to another language?

Chinese people have a big influence to many countries in the world, and it makes us to think about possibility of changing our international language. The size of Russian’s territory also makes us thinking about it. Another example of possible new global language is Spanish, for it is one of the most spoken languages which is used in Mexico, South America and Spain. Those three languages we can consider as our lingua franca because there are some reasons for that. Firstly, China is becoming one of the influential partners because of growth of the economy. Secondly, Russians have the biggest part of territory which is really rich of many resources. Thirdly, Spanish takes the third place as one of the popular languages. But, in spite of this, we all know that the power of a language comes through economy situation, so even if it was possible about changing our lingua franca, the world would not ready for that because it is a really huge step in a life of society and it could negatively change the situation in our world.

To sum up, I suppose that English will not lose its power as the lingua franca for the next decades definitely because of social factor, it plays a large role in language dominance, and historical situation we have today.