There were many lingua francas of which French was supposedly the first global lingua franca. That changed and it became English (from what I understand). We will probably see another language become the lingua franca, so my question is: should it be English? Are there better candidates out there? Why / why not?
The point is having a common language and thus economic and cultural advantages. English is a secondary language for most people. In the US, it’s probably replaced with Spanish.
With Arabic, you have many more primary language speakers. Thanks to immigration, the transition to Arabic can be made easy. Then it’s possible to sell products in one packaging from Portugal to India.
I am not arguing that this should happen. It’s just an opportunity that is not obvious because Arabic is not a traditional European language. Though I would assume that there are now more Arabic than Basque speakers.
Again, English would make so much more sense as a common language than Arabic. There are more English speakers in Egypt alone than there are Arabic speakers in the whole EU.
Yeah but Arabic is much cooler than English.
Could you explain why? Is there something about the language that makes it cool?
It sounds badass. The script looks dope. It is much richer in vocabulary than English. I say let’s do it!
Opinions really differ on that 🤣 And every language has rich vocab.
I was kinda expecting something along the lines of linguistics e.g Arabic has no gender, the script is alphasyllabic, it’s Subject Object Verb, sentences have strict structure, or something like that. Just a personal opinion isn’t really convincing, unfortunately.
Nah I mean I have some friends and they told me a camel has like 50 different names depending on how old it is and what it’s doing right now, e.g. a female camel who gave birth three months ago or a sitting camel or a camel that drinks an unusual amount of water (I’m making up stuff rn) would have their own names. Or here’s a list of date cultivars, there are like tens of names for the different types of dates it wild: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_date_cultivars
Otherwise I was honestly just kidding. It’s an interesting question but realistically it’s gonna be English and imo kids should learn English from kindergarten on and people would be bilingual like in India, or Kurds, Amazigh, Sudanese people who are native speakers in Arabic and their own local language. We could have all administration EU wide be bilingual too and that would honestly make it so much easier for everyone to move around and also for migrants that we desperately need to come here.
But with fascism being cool again I‘m afraid we’re moving far away from what I have in mind.
Ah that wasn’t clear :D
With fascism spreading rapidly in the US and it now being globalised, it’s not improbable that EU right-wingers will call for better English classes in order to have more people who can be influenced and understand messages from the US. Whether they will actually get rid of the EU is doubtful as it could function as a great money funnel from the US to right-wing politicians.