What an odd thing to veto. Was there a good reason for it, or was it just to preserve the "lingua franca" over a new contender?
French is actually used in some international organization: international post (and aviation I think?) as well as diplomacy. That latter one may make some politicians blind to the fact that the game is set: English won as the de facto international language.
France could dispute the status of superpower to UK in the time of colonial empires but this time is definitely over, but some are deluded into thinking that we could still dispute the status of English as the predominant language.
It is a combination of pride and laziness that makes so many people consider that we should not accept English as an international language. I find it stupid, but it is not a thing that is specific to the far-right nationalists.
This is really a pity, as it unnecessarily slowing down EU integration. I hope the newer generations of French understand it.
Do you realize how much power and influence this gives the USA? We have Captain America in theaters, but Captain China and Peru are nowhere to be seen. When's the last time you've seen a company motto in Spanish or Italian? English, I'm Loving It, Just Do It, Think Different.
Does it make sense to make English the de-facto standard language for the EU when Ireland is the only country left in it which uses it natively?
I'm all for people learning English to facilitate the dialogue between countries and cultures but I think it's very noble and important to strive to preserve diversity, linguistically and culturally.
D'un français à un autre, en anglais, sur un forum anglophone.
English is now the lingua franca in many fields due to US hegemony as you say. Even though it's not due to any inherent virtue it's not, of itself, a bad thing. I'm not a big fan of Americanization (sic) but that's a slightly different thing from a common means of communication. The latter may well mean we have to suffer some of the former but I personally think it's worth it (don't tell my daughter I, like, said that OK?).
Obviously this will never happen but now would be great time for the EU to adopt English as a common tongue, precisely because of Brexit. It'd clearly not be because of a cultural dominance within the EU and it would save a ton of money and a lot of wasted effort. I await the response of the Académie française with bated breath.
And obviously I won't oppose English becoming the language of the EU since the other obvious contender would be German and I can barely speak a lick of Deutsch!
Obviously if you're in a ancient british colony like Hong Kong or parts of India then you owe much of the english heritage to the queen's servants but elsewhere english has been pushed massively by the powerhorse that are the USA.
The american entertainment industry plows through all cultures, all demographics and brings you Mac Donalds, Toy Story, Rihanna and Coca Cola even if you're lost in Kazakhstan. Dr Who and Fish and Chips can't compete. Or is it Fish'n'Fries?
That said, promoting French should not be equated with replacing other languages (like it was done with regional languages): it is a non-zero-sum game as people can learn multiples languages. So we should not only promote French as a second language for international communication but also work harder to learn foreign languages. In this framework, nor English nor Esperanto development are ennemies of French use.
However, I fully agree that France should be careful to preserve its own linguistic culture lest they become like Sweden or the Netherlands in terms of getting dominated by Anglophone patterns of thought and expression.
At this stage, therefore, the strongest opposition to
Esperanto came from France, whose strongly nationalistic
government opposed the internationalist aims of Esperanto.
French nationalism was expressed, inter alia, in support for
the use of French as the international language. Since
Versailles, English had threatened the status of French. The
League of Nations was officially bilingual, though (with
French encouragement) French soon became its dominant
language. France was thus hardly likely to favour any kind
of threat to the prestige of its language.
Source: Forster, Peter (1982). The Esperanto Movement. Page 175.
To link to a specific page in a book in Google Books, add the URL parameter "pg=PA<#>" where "<#>" is the page number.
Ironically, the term lingua franca doesn't actually refer to French as many people think, but to the Frankic language Sabir. Sabir was similar to modern Romance languages, but still distinct from them.
The language no longer exists, because as it spread across the Mediterranean, it ended up forking and influencing the local languages there instead.
Such is typically the fate of common languages.
The wikipedia article notes that by the time of Sabir, "Frank" had turned into a generic term for western Europeans, which makes the term make more sense -- to the Byzantines, Italians and Spaniards were "Franks". Left unexplained is why the Byzantines would refer to Sabir with a phrase in Latin, a language they didn't speak.
There should be a comma after "language": "but to the Frankic language, Sabir". As in, lingua franca literally means "the Frankic language", and it referred to Sabir.
Chinese, which spread across China 2000 years ago, vary a lot from region to region, even more so than the languages you've mentioned.
After the time of the source, shortly after diverging[1], they would still have been more similar than they are now because they hadn't had much time to differentiate.
[1] Unlike "the time of the source", you can rigorously defend the existence of the period shortly after divergence.
The net difference today is the net difference 2000 years ago plus all the new variations since then.
Why would everyone living in what is now China have spoken the same language 2000 years ago? The people living in what is now the US didn't. Neither did the people living in what's now the EU. Even small territories, such as just the islands of Okinawa had multiple language communities 2000 years ago.
National borders and the language communities within and across them fluctuate wildly over the course of a thousand years.
>" I note Cantonese and Mandarin "dialects" have a common (formal) written form."
They don't even have the same grammar. Cantonese includes characters that don't exist in Mandarin.
You might find this piece on Language Log interesting: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=548
"Just as Europeans who spoke various languages could communicate in Latin, so until recently all literate Chinese people could communicate in the somewhat artificial written standard. With the shift over the last century to a written language that is closer to the colloquial, the differences among dialects have increased."
That's not really the right question. 2500 years ago, the people in what is currently Spain spoke a language that was distinct from the language then spoken by the people in what is currently Italy. But it's still true that Spanish and Italian sounded exactly the same 2500 years ago.
I don't know spoken mandarin but I can read written Mandarin, I grew up knowing Cantonese. So I do think they have a common formal written form. And I did specify formal, that strips away the slang Cantonese characters.
It's interesting to see the paper compared the written form to Latin.
For nationalistic reasons, China views those as dialects, or did when John DeFrancis was writing about the issue. In the other hand, they share more of a culture (IIUC) and government than Italian and French do.
In the age where travel and communication is slow, yes. It's also why many languages that we perceive as monolithic today consisted of many often barely mutually intelligible dialects as late as 19th century.
But things are very different now.