This is a lament that English dominates as the lingua franca (oops!). Used to be Latin when the Catholic Church dominated Europe, but the heritage of Britain's astonishingly successful run as an imperial power is that English is the lingua franca.
The dominance of English as a medium of exchange has already far exceeded Britain's global influence. Convenient for us who speak English but of course more people speak Chinese and Spanish than do English as a native language. Every so often somebody says "in 2050 we'll all be speaking Chinese" or the like.
Actually, NO. we won't. The Chinese are already strengthening English's position as the lingua franca by speaking it themselves. India has made an even larger contribution to the English speaking world. So what about Chinese? I've studied Attic Greek, Latin, French, a smidge of spanish, and spent two years speaking Marathi. Now an embarrassing number of years into studying Chinese I can say that the absence of a phonetic alphabet is a fatal obstacle to Chinese as a lingua franca. Marathi - like the other Sanskrit derived languages - has a phonetic alphabet, making it much easier to learn. It is also an Indo-European language which makes the grammar unsurprising. That too has eased the persistence of English as India's second language - though the main reason is the resistance of Dravidian peoples to Hindi dominance.
- GWC
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