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Political and maybe ultimately economical. Latin script isn't much attractive due to southern Europe but mostly due to the enormous economic success of USA following the British Empire. Kazakh or any other nation want their children to learn English as it matters the most in addition to their mother tongue. Russian children too want to learn English for most. So any other secondary power in the world is shadowed by English. Slowly people don't want to learn French or German or Russian because they are those Nationals themselves striving to learn English as the business academic and travel language.

So the success of American economy drives the success of English and Latin script. Imho.

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English has reached enough of a critical mass by now that even if north America and the UK would fall off the surface of the earth tomorrow, it would take a few generations for another language to take it's place as a medium for international exchange. Newton wrote in Latin more than 1000 years after the empire left Britain.

Bad second language English (like e.g. mine, I feel quite at home in writing, but you should see me navigating the linguistic perils of a US supermarket checkout, not funny) is close to useless when talking to native speakers, but it can be invaluable as a common ground with other non-native speakers.

> Political and maybe ultimately economical.

Yes, but for different reasons. In practice it means tons of corrupt government contracts to cronies to republish textbooks, remake signage, update software and all government services to new alphabet, etc. Millions of dollars in contracts and kickbacks.

English is also the language of pop culture. Most popular movies are made in the US. So is a lot of pop music. The most popular science fiction authors write in English. Large parts of the Internet are English.

Not saying you are wrong but there may be a bias if you are English speaking. As a person with a another language as english as my first, lots of the internet I see is in my native language. Lots of new music and movies is as well.

What is your first language if i may ask? Curious what other languages have a lot of movies? Hindi?

Many countries dub Hollywood movies.

Ah, was curious as I didn't think Czechoslovakia or now the Czech republic had a film industry.

Actually it has a movie industry. Many movies from Czechoslovakia period are being considered "classic" and are still popular, with quotes from them being used all the time.

For foreign movies, there were also cases, when the dubbed versions were better (sounded better) than originals - for example Louis de Funès movies or MASH.

There are some great Czech films. Check out Jan Švankmajer!

What I find really interesting is that non-English speaking countries dub basically everything yet English speaking countries subtitle most of the time. Sometimes even things in English get subtitled (e.g. The Full Monty for the US market).

As a native English speaker dubbing drives me nuts. I want to see Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon subtitled not dubbed.

Why the preference? I know the French are super paranoid about the cultural hegemony of English. Is this the case elsewhere?

Interesting. I had the opposite perception. Most Europeans I know (Scandinavians, Germans, Dutch, British) prefer subtitles on movies (even when they are foreign non-English movies), whereas the impression I have gotten of Americans through e.g. news broadcasts and talkshows, have been that everything is dubbed into English (for example interviews from the EU parliament or other foreign countries). I am sure it depends on the context, but now I wonder if there are any statistics on when things are dubbed vs subtitled.

I am not sure if Europeans in general prefer subtitles. Most of my friend in Germany do. However, they are younger and well educated. Most people from my parent's generation probably would prefer dubs. It turns out that almost everything in Germany gets dubbed. You really gotta go out of your way if you want to see subs.

I wouldn't say news broadcasts and talk shows are a fair comparison here, as those are often watched passively (while cooking, cleaning, getting ready, chatting with friends) as opposed to film or dramatic television which are usually watched actively.

Dubbing also destroys immersion, which is bad for a story, but irrelevant for an interview. Rare is the dub where all the voice actors get all the emotion in the voice correct.

I'm Czech and a very large portion of the country doesn't speak any other language (not even Russian or German) at all, and they don't suffer from it at all.

I'm curious; I get why it's "even German", given that they're an economically prosperous neighbor with jobs etc. But why "even Russian", today?

I imagine that there's quite a lot of Czechs over the age of 27.

What vacri said; also, nowadays, some people choose Russian (you have to pick one foreign language that you'll learn next 7 years - parents do the choice) because it's relatively simple compared to English for Slavic native speakers.

The French have a robust film industry

I wonder how many are actually seen stateside. I know Amelie was a French film, but that's where my knowledge ends.

If it's anything like the UK, not many. Which is a shame because they produce some fantastic stuff.

For a solid introduction to a few, the best film selection of the Cesars is a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar_Award_for_Best_Film

A lot of small countries have a local film industry, but don't expect large-scale unlimited budget productions like you'd see in Hollywood.

Generally, if you are a small country, you have to pour a lot of money into the industry to be able to even compete with Hollywood, otherwise the small market size doesn't make it worthwhile to produce anything. It's essentially the state paying for a public good, where the good is culture in your own language.

Swedish. Edit: The market for scandinavian language entertainment is perhaps 15 milion people. Not a lot and theese industries is in no way a golden ticket to unlimited fortunes but the output is pretty consintently high quality stuff.

I absolutely adore the melodic way Swedish and Norwegian sound (I know they are mutually intelligible). I also like Finnish, but i know that is Uralic and completely different. I really wish I could pick up the language. Is there anything high quality outside crime dramas and the like?

Books. Plenty of really good classics around. If you want simpler Swedish, perhaps start with Astrid Lindgren (children's books primarily) or Tove Jansson (also children's books in the book stores, but they have many undertexts and are appreciated on more levels the older you get).

What's your preferred way to get Swedish books in the U.S.?

There may be some kind of bay of disreputable sailors where such items may be available for download

If you can get your hands on some Lars Molin films I can warmly recomend them. Usualy small comedic dramas in rural settings.

Thanks, will try!

I'm actually not a native speaker but nearly everything I do happens in English.

In the spirit of trading anecdotes: I'm Russian and I read and write an order of magnitude more in English than I do in Russian. Naturally, speaking is a different matter.

I speak three languages, and there's a painful truth: on average, English content is just better. Especially TV shows and movies.

Popularity being largely influenced by reach, I would say english is the language of a commonly shared subset of pop culture.

This may have been true at some point but I feel English would not have remained so popular without other reasons.

The language and writing system are simpler than most languages I've encountered. Most importantly in this age, English is easy to use with keyboards.

Looking at Latin languages there's a lot of time spent learning word conjugation. English has little gender, no formal/informal tenses, a single, mostly phonetic writing system. It doesn't have mutually unitelligble dialects. I don't know of any other widely spoken language with these attributes.

The writing system is simpler than most, mirroring comments of others here that English autocorrect works better and many of them ignore "extra" letters from their language when typing online. This extends even to Eastern countries which largely type using "pinyin", "romanji", etc... even though it's cultural taboo to send these messages without translating them to the symbols they represent first.

Some English language attributes may be a result of it's historical popularity rather than the cause, but either way I have heard these attributes make it easy to reach a broken but usable level of speaking ability.

> English has ... a single, mostly phonetic writing system.

You've got to be kidding me.

I think everyone who learned English has memories of pronouncing a word for the first time while reading it repeatedly. The fact that this is a usable way of learning words shows the it's fairly phonetic.

Contrast this to Chinese for example, where the symbol has almost no relation to pronounciation and some dialects are unintelligible even though the written form is exactly the same.

I think you're making a bit of a weird comparison by comparing English to supposed languages that have mutually unintelligible dialects. Mutually unintelligible ways of speaking should be considered different languages, not dialects.

Of course, politics interferes with this. For example, saying that the many ways people speak in China are "dialects of Chinese" is the PRC government's view, but linguists say they're deluding themselves. Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Gan, Hokkien, and so on are different languages.

So here you should be comparing English to Mandarin Chinese, not to every language that gets called "Chinese". Mandarin has even less inflection and word variation than English. It's true that its writing system is a mess, though, and it's even messier that it's used to write other languages that don't have their own standardized written forms.

There are many languages less phonetic than English, Chinese is just the best example I can think of. I was just pointing out that English spoken and written are close enough that you can learn one from the other.

I think Chinese is an example that's so extreme, it's not really very useful for such comparisons.

Anyway, if we look at European languages, English is the one that's extreme in terms of how non-obvious the correspondence of its script and its phonetics are. It's not just that the mapping is very arbitrary - French can be similarly arbitrary in dropping consonants, for example - but it's also very inconsistent. You think you've learned how some combination of letters is pronounced by looking at some word and then hearing it... and then you find out that the same combination can be pronounced in three more ways.

There are still patterns behind all it, and eventually you grok them, but they're way more complicated than "this letter plus this letter gives this sound", which is typical of other languages - or at least such simplified rules can be used to speak in a way that others will understand. Not so in English - you have to learn all those exceptions and subtle rules to be understood.

A few examples: "live" / "life"; "leaf" / "leaven"; "over" / "oven"; "even" / "seven"; "dew" / "sew"; "dull" / "bull"; "mint" / "pint".

Hmm, they better start learning Chinese too...

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