What made english the lingua franca?

Their collaborationist politicians basically went the neutral route and were like "we dindu nuffins, we got invaded by Hitler just like the czechs" after the war and it worked, both the US and USSR used Austria as a central european buffer zone between their interest spheres akin to Finland in scandinavia

Churchill wanted to create a new de-facto Austro-Hungarian state after the war (called "Southern German State" in his plans) but that one never worked out unfortunately

Britain controlled world trade via naval supremacy in 19th century.
America controlled world trade via massive industry, leases, loans, etc in the 20th century.
The world is over 200 years into English speaking nations controlling world trade.

when will english stop being the lingua franca? after the nuclear war perhaps?

After some other world economic power replaces america for 100 years or so.

>that one never worked out unfortunately
Because the first one went so well...

but internet and globalization has made the english root in the globe stronger than ever
i doubt even in 200 years it changes, even if the USA gets nuked to the point that it stops existing

Then simply feel glad that you already speak english and don't have to make the effort everyone else has to.
I mean, I don't know if it's your first language, but regardless you gotta admit speaking english is really comfy.

>I don't know if it's your first language
ill take that as a compliment, it isnt
>speaking english is really comfy
in what sense? a lot of people have a hard time learning english, how is it comfy?

English isn't *the* lingua franca. It's a lingua franca. Large parts of the world use Spanish instead, for example.

And there's many reasons English got to the position it's in. Such as, the language being brought to, or imposed on, the colonies, and the US's status as a superpower and an important international trade partner, as well as, though to a much smaller degree, the dimished prestige of speaking German after WWII (at the time a majority of American men were fluent in German, but after the war they stopped teaching their children).

>a lot of people have a hard time learning english, how is it comfy?
Because we already speak it. You of course had to put in effort into the matter, but now that you speak it the learning of other languages reduces itself to a novelty, rather than necessity.

There's no such thing as "the" lingua franca.

>in what sense? a lot of people have a hard time learning english, how is it comfy?

Not the guy you're replying to, but a lot of people have a hard time learning other languages too. Every language has tough spots, for example the crazy amount of homonyms in English, but overall its definitely one of the easier languages to learn, the grammar rules are much simpler compared to most languages

the pronunciation rules are quite complicated and non-sensical tho like french, phonetics are way easier in finnish, spanish or italian imo
conversational english is the hardest part of english probably

Right like I said there are difficult aspects to every language, but as far as picking it up the grammar is pretty straight forward, like one of the biggest benefits to English is that you don't need to learn an arbitrary masculine/feminine article for every conceivable object.

>overall its definitely one of the easier languages to learn
No language is inherently easier to learn than any other. Some languages are more closely related to each other, and as such native speakers have an easier time to learn those related languages than they would have learning a completely separate one.

The US government has for example compiled a list over exactly how much time a diplomat in training needs to learn a foreign language well enough to handle themselves in the country on diplomatic missions. The first group, where they're expected to need no more than a couple of weeks of full time studies, are the Scandinavian languages. The second group, where they're expected to need another couple of weeks, consists of just German. Then the third group, with an expected training time of a couple of months, are the Romance languages. And so on, and so on. This does not mean that Icelandic is inherently easier to learn than German. It means that for an English speaker it's slightly easier to learn Icelandic than German.

As you said yourself
>Every language has tough spots
And everything that's seemingly simple in one is compensated by something else being more complicated. In English, for example, word order is extremely important to convey meaning as that information isn't transmitted through the morphology. As a native speaker you don't notice, because that's just how you talk, but to a native speaker of an agglutinative language with much laxer word order that would potentially seem very complicated and arbitrary.

This post is just reaffirming everything I said, minus "English is one of the easier languages to learn", which I understand isn't strictly true given the dependence on your native language, I was simply trying to point out that the lack of cases, gender, word agreement and overall fairly simplistic grammar structure don't make it the monster a lot of native English speakers with no other languages make it out to be. A lot of people have English as a second language and the thing about English is that its easy to learn but difficult to master.

>Britain
>relevant
They were matched evenly with France then America came in and told it to release the colonies
British itself never eclipsed france culturally, only economically

>t. Pierre

>British itself never eclipsed france culturally, only economically
So it eclipsed France.
Some autists will learn a language to read another languages literature, but normal people are morel likely to do it to get paid.

More like T cleatus
Yes, for the two minutes it took America to tell them to drop the colonies after WW2 they eclipsed France

I mean If thats the case all of Europe has been eclipsed by Middle Eastern oil money. Economical eclipse = total eclipse apparently

Hollywood
US Dollar backed currency
Hollywood
Hollywood

No it was more about the entire Cold War in general

Which is why we're talking about english and not french as the main global lingua franca, eh?
And what language of business do oil sheikh's use

Nah, it's clearly not because of Britain ruling shitholes in the 19th century, dumb bongs

>During the 17th century, French replaced Latin as the most important language of diplomacy and international relations (lingua franca). It retained this role until approximately the middle of the 20th century, when it was replaced by English as the United States became the dominant global power following the Second World War.[60][61]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language#Modern_French

Before WW2, English language was irrelevant outside of the British Empire (aka Britain = a collection of irrelevant shitholes) and America

Barely anyone in the civilized world (at that time Europe) could speak it
To the point German diplomats in 1914 had to use French to address British ones ("chiffon de papier" comes from that, the conversation took place in French).
There are also many records of WW2 US troops having to use French to talk with civilians in Italy, the Netherlands or Germany as locals in these countries didn't know a word of English (unlike what you see in modern movies)

American domination made English the lingua franca after WW2 (to a point not reached by any other language before that) thank to the invention of mass media
American mass media (hollywood, pop music and more recently the internet) spread all over the planet and made English the second language in the most developped areas of the world (Europe, Japan, China, Russia...)

French was the lingua franca in the 19th century.

Austrians and hungarians are literally stepbrothers to each other, it was the jews who destroyed austro-hungary

Gee, i wonder why would a language of two successive world's greatest powers for two centuries become a lingua franca of the world

Especially when those two centuries saw a dramatic change in the ease of communication

>all these people saying that it was because of "muh empire"
>implying english was even close to becoming the lingua franca before the 20th century

imagine being this butthurt at the existence of Britian

Jews were the ones who actually liked Austria-Hungary, and Franz Joseph was called "Judenkaiser" because of how chummy he was with the Jews.
It's also nonsense to think Hungarians would ever want to be in one state with the Habsburgs/Austrians ever again when they actively tried to get the fuck away from them for good three centuries.

You created us but your relevance ends there
Deal with it

>dub films
Not in Scandinavia.

>And what language of business do oil sheikh's use

America's
What does this have to do with Europe?

Anecdotal but I was conversing with a Moroccan who spoke berber, Arabic, French. English and something else. He told me English was the easiest in his opinion by far? I know it's just anecdotal though

You have your own version of English with funny spellings, Nigel. Dont try to jump on the American English bandwagon now.

english is a frankenstein of many languages
Old norse + french + germanic
at least in spanish and italian, the french words they get are "adapted" to their language rules
in english the french words are just the same
lieutenant, coup de etat....

In English the French words sound aristocratic while the Anglo-Saxon words sound like peasant shit. That's because the Norman nobility with their French vocabulary ruled over hordes of smelly unwashed Anglo-Saxon plebs.
Compare:
liberty vs freedom
enquire vs ask
phantom vs ghost
royal vs kingly
amicable vs friendly
ire vs anger
feeble vs weak
valuable vs worthy
manner vs behavior
faith vs belief

And the best example is meat, where the words for the animal are Anglo-Saxon, but the words for meat are Norman/French, implying the Anglo-Saxons were raising the animals but the Norman lords were eating the meat (pig -> pork, cow -> beef, sheep -> mutton)

I think you forgot to include the fact that Britian eclipsed France economically, politically, and amassed an Empire that put France's to shame

reality my dear tea-drinking friend, has an anti-british bias

>Was it the American involvement on WW2 and the latter stationed troops on west germany?

Yes

Before it, French was the language of the diplomacy while Latin and German were the language of the Academia.

>German

Why did this happen? Easier to build new words to cover new scientific and philosophical concepts?

Germans were both the most numerous and had the greatest mind of that time, so their language naturally became the language of science.

It lasted longer than the German empire so yeah why not, now if only the Czechs called themselves bohemian and that didn't become a term for faggots

They always called themselves Czechs, Bohemian was just a Latin name for them.

There are more people from outside the anglo countries who use English than from within. English belongs to everyone now and it's going to be interesting to see how it evolves on both regional and global scales.

>politically
Uh, okay.
>amassed an empire
Cool, it still doesnt change the fact that it was Americas emergence as a Superpower that established English as a Lingua franca, not any of the British achievements.

Not all Czechs are Bohemians...don't forget about the MORAVIANS! (It's like why we say BRITISH for the UK, they're not all Englishmen, as their are Scotsman and Welshman, too!)

Moravians are not Czechs (Češi), they are Moravians (Moraváci).

Just ask Lincoln.

Czech has become the common term for citizens of the Czech Republic, and is used to denote BOTH Bohemians and Moravians. A Moravian will never call himself a "Bohemian," but he will call himself a Czech.

I don't care about any of that, in your post it you stated that Britain only managed to break even with France's relevance on the world stage, i disagree.

>not wanting Latin to be mainstream once more
And then we can read the bible once more

Thats fine, but the only reason any of that is relevant was people are using it to somehow justify English being the lingua franca, ignoring that French was the lingua Franca literally the entire time that happened
If you disagree about the entire England vs France I really cant blame you tho

British/American imperialism

There's no such thing as "the" lingua franca, this silly meme of making up a non-existent international title for a language and pretending French has ever been as widespread internationally as English currently is by claiming France once held this non-existent title is a ridiculous meme.

>British itself never eclipsed france culturally, only economically

I know Veeky Forums has a massive raging erection for the French and hates Britain with a burning passion but this statement is too retarded even for this board.

>its another episode of an angry Anglo being pedantic
You could atleast google what Lingua franca is before throwing an autistic shitfit over the term
Not an argument

Eurofags are so fucking stupid and full of themselves.
English dominates the planet because USA has dominated for so long, we are the reason and the reason alone.

I know perfectly well what a lingua franca is and my point was not pedantic, this silly, completely illogical meme has to die.

Then you should understand that Lingua franca is not a meme and there are multiple Lingua francas often decided by geographic location
>Im not being pedantic but I totally zeroed Im on the use of the word the as a title because Im a pedant and it wasnt preceded by one of

>English dominates the planet because USA has dominated for so long.

70 years isn't a very long time at all.

Nobody has ever dominated the world like the US has for a day before then, so 70 years is pretty impressive no?

>Then you should understand that Lingua franca is not a meme and there are multiple Lingua francas often decided by geographic location

That was pretty much my point, though, I'm not the one talking about "the" lingua franca.

>Nobody has ever dominated the world like the US has for a day before then

Well nobody other than Britain anyway.

Last I checked dominant powers werent dismantled by former colonies

This

Britbong eternally BTFO

Also, you should call it American language and not English language

The USA played a small role but there were lots of reasons for British decolonisation, nor is that even a serious point, every dominant power sees an end to its dominance at some point.

Im sure, Nigel.
Whatever helps you sleep at night knowing the sun has set on the British Empire

I don't mind that the sun has set, the age of imperialism is over and that is a good thing.

It does seem that you are mad that in reality contemporary US power is much smaller than that wielded by the great empires of the past. Why does such a silly thing upset you so much?

>great empires

You seem very jealous, don't cry, at least you have Puerto Rico, take some small shred of comfort in that.

>jealous
No user the only other country close to American influence was the USSR, it just tickles me when anglos pretend they were relevant for longer than 70 or so years.
And accomplished less to boot. I dont see a British UN.

Because French was considered a language of prestige among the European monarchies.

>No user the only other country close to American influence was the USSR

Oh dear, you're such a comedian, I actually feel bad for you. Still as the mighty rulers of Puerto Rico you can still take a nice holiday.

>literally the mighty slayer of argentines, ruler of falklands
And you still lost a war to 13 colonies

>And you still lost a war to 13 colonies
A skirmish in a series of wars with France, which we of course won.

You sound like cleatus when we tell him we lost Vietnam, its cute.

>cleatus
learn to spell Mamadou

Sounds French.
Lingua franca confirmed

As long as you are admitting that you lost Vietnam, that's at least a start.

I mean its the same idea as beating the British meme, despite the British empire not being worth a shit til the late 1800s

See

?

So you posted a map showing how enormous the British Empire was in 1815 to prove it was nothing until the late 1800s?

Are you thick?

>mighty slayer of argentines, ruler of falklands
Only a brainlet would say this. Argentina was one of the top naval powers in 1982, one of only a handful of countries to own an aircraft carrier and a very modern airforce and navy, including state of the art Super Etendard naval bombers and Exocet anti-ship missiles that had just been delivered by France. The war was won with a little over a thousand casualties on both sides in about two months, it saw the greatest naval battles since WW2.

What has the US done in the same period? Lose against Vietnamese rice farmers?

We have more military bases than they do land in all those places?
Thats not very big lol

>We have more military bases than they do land in all those places?

I was wondering when this meme would come up. The UK still has military bases in the Middle East, we don't own the Middle East as an imperial possession.

Do you seriously think your map showing British imperial possession of some of the most populous parts of the world shows it was actually a small empire or that it those possessions are just equivalent to having a military base there. Ha ha ha ha ha aha haaaaaa. You're so funny.

I mean the same period saw the USSR collapse and the US ascend to hyper power
But Im sure two second rate naval powers duking it out is to be expected
>admitting that your empire wasnt made up of imperial possessions
So its all a meme? Should I cite half of Europes automotive industry thats owned by American companies?