Lingua Franca

Lingua franca (or working language, bridge language, vehicular language) is a language systematically used to make communication possible between people not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both mother tongues.

Linguas franca have been seen all over the world throughout history – vulgar Latin around the Mediterranean in the Ancient World, Swahili in East Africa, Hausa in West Africa and Plains Sign Language (not to be confused with American Sign Language) used by the aboriginal peoples of North America.

The original Lingua Franca was a mixed language composed mostly of Italian with a broad vocabulary drawn from Turkish, French, Greek, Arabic, Portuguese and Spanish. It was in use throughout the eastern Mediterranean as the language of commerce and diplomacy in and around the Renaissance era. At that time, Italian speakers dominated seaborne commerce in the port cities of the Ottoman Empire. Franca was the Italian word for Frankish. Its usage in the term lingua franca originated from its meaning in Arabic and Greek, dating from before the Crusades and during the Middle Ages, whereby all Western Europeans were called "Franks".

It was seemingly in use since the Middle Ages and surviving until the nineteenth century, when it disappeared with hardly a trace, probably under the onslaught of the triumphant French language.
The language was never written. No poetry, no folktales, no translation of the Bible, just a way to sell the merchandise what you had to offer, or haggle for a better price on its purchase.  Lingua Franca seemed to be lost forever, since it died before the advent of the tape recorder or of anthropologists anxious to record a moribund form of human speech.

English as a Lingua Franca

English has unmistakably achieved global status as the world's lingua franca. It is the most successful language in the history of the world. It is spoken on every continent, is learnt as a second language by schoolchildren and it’s dominating in science, global business and popular culture.
The predominance of English has been criticised in particular by French-speaking groups. French was a prestige lingua franca for centuries. Although it is now declining in this role, the French government and French elites have mounted a campaign to promote and defend French in international settings.

The Future of English

English is expanding as a lingua-franca but not as a mother tongue. More than 1 billion people speak English worldwide but only about 330m of them as a first language, and this population is not spreading. The future of English is in the hands of countries outside the core Anglophone group. Will they always learn English?

Chinese is often mentioned as the most likely rival of English for global lingua franca status. Some linguists say that in the future English will be the lingua franca of the West, and Mandarin is going to be the lingua franca of the East.
But many experts don’t believe that Mandarin will topple English even as the region's lingua franca. When considering any sector, political, economic, cultural or linguistic, English still appears to score very much higher than Mandarin. The complexity of the written language is a big obstacle. Of course the situation would be a little different if China chooses to give up its character writing.

There is also a theory saying that English will fade as a lingua-franca, but not because some other language will take its place. No pretender is pan-regional enough, and only Africa’s linguistic situation may be sufficiently fluid to have its future choices influenced by outsiders. English will have no successor because none will be needed. It is technology that will fill the need. This argument relies on huge advances in computer translation and speech recognition.

So may be future generations will come to see English as something like calligraphy or Latin; prestigious and traditional, but increasingly dispensable.