World Languages and another Lingua Franca?

My Project 2 topic is “Should there be a lingua franca?” and it is a little ambitious as it tackles the implications of having a lingua franca: so that entails why we have one and why we need it, as well as whether or not having English as the lingua franca is fair, and if not, what language we could possibly use instead. I’m really excited about my topic, because the reason I took this class was to learn more about when and how people use English (or another language) to bridge communication gaps, and so I want to use this language log as a way to talk about my topic, and as a way to put some of my ideas on paper before I actually start writing my essay. 

I’m going to focus on a subset of my research which is “Could another language be the lingua franca?” 

The first thing to look at here is the sheer number of speakers. This includes native and non-native speakers, not just native, because we are looking at the possibility of these languages becoming the/a lingua franca. So some of these languages in the top ten stand out, Mandarin of course, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, French. 

Next, it’s important to look at how the speakers of that language are dispersed. Hindi and Mandarin are actually bound to one continent, with almost all of their native and non-native speakers residing in Asia. Neither of these languages, for a variety of reasons, will likely become a lingua franca, even within their geographical region, which is mostly due to these languages being native to only one country, and that other languages like Cantonese or Bengali, are also prominent in these countries. 

Arabic is very interesting as well, in its own unique way. While Arabic has approximately 420 million speakers, the language from one part of the Arab speaking world might not be intelligible to someone from the other side of the Arab world. Only about 273 million of the 420 million speakers speak Standard Arabic, which is a literary language with no native speakers. Originally I thought that Arabic would be a great candidate for a lingua franca, because it is wide spread, has a lot of speakers, and that Arabic is unique in that Muslims are supposed to read the Quran in the original language it was written in: Arabic. However, the Arabic that the Quran uses is very arcane, and we’ve already discussed that Arabics widespread nature has led to it being quite the fragmented language, almost warranting different language distinctions entirely from region to region. 

Spanish and French span at least a couple continents, you could stretch it and say that they each reside on 3-4 continents. French is already used as a lingua franca in the Francophone countries in Africa, where African peoples use French to bridge gaps in communication between tribal languages, but French actually has very few native speakers in comparison to those who use it as their L2, which is interesting. Spanish is the opposite and actually has relatively few L2 speakers in comparison to its number of native language speakers, and Spanish is mostly spoken in South and Latin America, with very few speakers elsewhere. With Spanish becoming more prominent in the United States, it could be interesting to see whether or not Spanish will become the lingua franca of the Americas, much like how French is the regional lingua franca in parts of Africa. The fact that these languages have a regional lingua franca status is not something I actually thought about before writing this.

So while two of these languages have the potential to be (or remain) strong regional lingua francas, it's unlikely that a nonwestern language would become a lingua franca within the foreseeable future.