Why did Latin stop being the main lingua franca? Did a bunch of hipsters in the late middle ages just decide "duuuude...

>pidgins

>getting assblasted because a different place speaks differently than you

Latin was literally never the "Lingua Franca" though. In the past people who were literate spoke Latin sure, but it was never at any point of universal language.
Even during the Roman Empire the aristocracy communicated in Greek.

French became the global language because OP, because a shit ton of people actually spoke French. In the same way a shit ton of people speak English now. In the future the Lingua Franca could be Spanish or Chinese, who knows. A language becomes "lingua franca" because it's already widely spoken.

Nigger we have more surviving Latin from the Middle Ages than we do from the classical era

yes, the modern forms evolved from local pidgins.

No.

Basically, when the WRE fell, it fractured into little bits, and trade and communication between everyone got fucked up. So everyone went around speaking Latin (which was already measurably dialect-ed by that time), but it changed over time. Regions being isolated and pre-existing languages influenced the "Latin" they were speaking, and eventually it got fucked up enough that they couldn't understand each other

As for the French, there were a lot of French and France was once an incredibly powerful country. Everyone learned French because the French were DA BES (just like America is now; such it yuropoors)

Because the Empire died, and people stopped learning the language formally. Vulgar Latin arose, a few fragments was written and that was early French.

Louis XIV

The distinction between vulgar and "real" Latin is largely a meme of 19th century historiography

While there is some truth to this, it is worth making the distinction that in medieval times it was those associated with the Catholic Church that spoke Latin. Many people in the nobility were educated by Papal Scholars, but in reality it wasn't exactly something they spoke often.
Latin WAS however widely Spoken within the confines of the Roman Empire. During the late Republic and into the Empire more and more people spoke Latin as Romanization spread. Provincials spoke their native tongue(s) but everyone pretty much spoke Latin. Multilinguality was far more common in the Roman Empire than many assume.
As you said, Greek was also very widespread, because prior to Rome there was the Hellenic age and the diffusion of Hellenic culture ensured the diffusion of the language across their colonies, kingdoms, and (at least) in a fair amount of those peoples and states they traded with. To what extent on the latter isn't certain.

BUT Greek wasn't really exclusively spoken by the aristocracy. much like medieval latin, most of the literature in the mediteranean world at the time of Rome was written in Greek. Ergo if you are educated you probably know how to read Greek for literacy purposes. Philhellenism being rampant furthered this in Rome's Empire and it is worth noting things also DID get published in latin. Quite a lot obviously.

Why did French stop being the main lingua franca? Did a bunch of hipsters in the late 20th century just decide "duuuude, fuck it, lets not learn the language of diplomacy, education, literature, and commerce, lets learn ENGLISH YEEHAW PARDNER!"

By the 20th Century far more people spoke English than French.
>USA
>UK
>UK's Colonies, which had more people than anyone elses.

Because the UK became the dominant world power and everyone started speaking English.

Deny it all you want, it's true. The romance languages all evolved from the vulgar Latin used by the Roman provincials in the area, with admixture from various other languages like Frankish, Arabic, etc.

>vulgar latin
I don't think people are that rude

You'd be surprised how foul-mouthed a late roman peasant can be.

The shift from French to English happened because of the US' rise to predominance post WW1 and 2, not the UK's. If you went on a tripcto Europe in the early 1900s, you'd still have to speak French to communicate (although of course the amount of people actually speaking French would be limited, but still greater than English speakers).

>dude lets learn chinese its gonna be the world language in several years lol

I would like to hear more about this topic. Is mandarin gaining any footholds internationally?

I doubt it. Mandarin isn't suited to be the primary language of business because it's so difficult to learn.
English might have a lot of slang that can be confusing but that's the hardest part.
Mandarin is at least two or three levels harder to learn.

In my country (Argentina), and I imagine, many other countries, French stopped being the lingua franca in the late 70s.
By that I mean, every high class, middle class person with aspirations, who wanted to consider himself cultured, had to know French.
Because of that May 69, and the sixties writers like Camus and Sartre, were huge in Latin America, and many middle class people became leftist revolutionaries.
By the late 70s and 80s, the foreign language people had to know became English.
I think the ingua franca status of English owes more to the USA than to the XIX century British Empire.

In terms of culture, yes: Britain was infatued by French culture and probably helped the spread of it. In terms of trade and economy, no. The British Empire was very important for the spread of English on that basis.

The birth place of Charlemagne is Quierzy-Sur-Oise, and he was rex FRANCcorum not rex germanorum.
Charlemagne is french,Hans

what I meant is that before the 80s, the average person there thought that learning English was just for understanding what The Beatles sang. Educated people studied French, and that had been the situation for centuries, since the Illustration and the Borbons.
But in the 90s, knowing or not knowing English meant getting or not getting a job. And very very few people studied French.
I am pretty sure more people study German in Argentina (because of ancestry, or because they go to bilingual German high schools) than French, when French used to be the educated language.

Roman science was vastly inferior to the Greeks. It's a shame that the former's culture decided the trend of it for the following 1000 years.

Do you know what a pidgin is?

You're talking about dialects and linguistic influence. A pidgin is a bare-bones contact language that doesn't really have grammar, and doesn't really last beyond a generation. The Romance languages were definitely *not* formed from pidgins.

>furry Stirner
Who did this, and why?

Charlemagne is Franc rigth but a Franc is germans population, a French is a Franc with a latin culture. Regnum Francorum=> Franc's kingdom not the Kingdom of Francia who start to appears on the title of Philippe le Bel manys centuries after Charlemagne.

>furry stirner
saved. homo sapiens is a spook

I mean, he's German insofar as he spoke a Germanic language. He spoke Old Franconian, or Frankish, which is a now extinct member of the West Germanic language family. It includes Old High German (the ancestor of Modern German), Old Low German, and the Anglo-Frisian Languages. While he doesn't have quite pedigree to join Hans's WE WUZ patty, he certainly did speak a Germanic language.

He spoke Old High German

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne#Language

Language don't matter, what matter is the blood. And the germans aren't descendants of the franks but of severals germanic tribes like the bavarians, saxons, et caetera

Vulgar Latin transformed over time into the local Romance languages we have today or died out, there were still for example, "African Romance" speakers in Tunisia in the 13th century who thought of themselves as Romans.

How did it stop?

French and Spanish are still Latin languages, and Romania.

The rest were Greek dominated until something else came and conquered them.

You are right but pidgin is the wrong word. Creole would be better

After the fall of Rome classical Latin was only spoken by clergy, since they were the only people who would read and write and thus stick to the language of ancient manuscripts. Meanwhile among the people Latin evolved as a spoken language into its various forms (French, Italian, Spanish etc).

Then starting in the 11th century, French nobility and culture became extremely influential, French became the language of nobility everywhere, and then by extension of all international business. Latin still remained the language of scholars though, until the influence of the Church waned in the 17th century.

>French became the language of nobility everywhere,
no

t. people without linguistic background

Yes.

It became the language of England in 1066, of the Crusader states in 1099, and after that cadet branches of the House of France and other French nobles gradually took over most courts of Europe, and learning French was part of any decent education. By the 13th century French also dominated civil society and literature. It was still spoken among the nobility of several countries like Russia or Germany in the 19th century.

but thats what latin was, it was a 'lingua franca' a common language used by people of different linguistic groups to communicate, and the official international language of both the church, politics and intelectuals for centuries, to the point fuctons of technical terms to this day in any given area or field including many of the fields themselves from law to orthopedics are still derived from latin