{"id":223,"date":"2009-11-05T00:46:44","date_gmt":"2009-11-04T22:46:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/?p=223"},"modified":"2010-02-14T01:40:20","modified_gmt":"2010-02-13T23:40:20","slug":"making-the-language-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/making-the-language-of-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Making The World’s Language"},"content":{"rendered":"

I want to talk a bit about making the lingua franca, the international or the bridge language of the world. I don’t want to give you a summary that you can find everywhere else, instead I want to share my idea<\/strong> with you. Having that in mind, you still need some context first.<\/p>\n

The Lingua Franca<\/h2>\n

My Oxford American Dictionary gives the definition of lingua franca<\/em> as:<\/p>\n

a language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The idea is that if you are Greek and you want to communicate with somebody from Spain, you both use some other language declared international. This way you only have to speak your native language and some other language to communicate with absolutely everybody in the world. Learning any other languages would be optional. We would save a lot on translation. We could also achieve a better level of communication between peoples because if you were to learn only one foreign language well, you could learn it up to a very high standard<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Currently such a language is English<\/strong>. I and a lot of other people don’t quite like that because English is difficult<\/strong>: it is difficult in its grammar (man and men instead of mans, think and thought instead of thinked, etc.) even if you disregard the spelling which is very irregular. Furthermore, English is not similar enough to other languages in the world (it is European) hence not really neutral and constructed in such a way that it is pretty hard to pronounce for non-natives because it has a lot of peculiar sounds which you can see if you look at its IPA sound chart. There are additional reasons.<\/p>\n

Candidates for Lingua Franca<\/h2>\n

The thing is, economic and social factors instead of rationality usually dictate what lingua franca we have. In Europe, we had French just because the royalty spoke French and now we have English due to the prominence of the United States and it might change as China’s economy rises or some other interesting things occur.<\/p>\n

If we, however, could actually make an informed choice (which is possible, although hard to implement), it would probably be logical to choose a constructed language instead of a natural one because:<\/p>\n