Ah yes, English, the Lingua Franca.
The official language of international commerce is broken English
Fun fact, this is also the language spoken in the us
If the internationally recognised langauge is broken English then I’m the king of speaking broken barely understandable English with accents that make things unledigble winner winner oh god stargazy pie is for dinner
The Esperanto of languages, wait
Is that a /s?
But you yourself wrote it in english.
It’s a pun, so more of a /j. I’m not sure how well it would work in French, since I’m very far from fluent.
It’s just a statement of fact - English is the most common Lingua Franca. The fact that the original term referred to the Frankish region, the predecessor to modern day France, makes the sign kinda ironic.
A unifed global language is one of the characteristics of a type 1 civilization and right now English happens to be in a position to become that language. But whether or not English is the optimal option is a whole different can of worms. Since language and culture are so intertwined, the idea of the cultures, beliefs, and “mindsets” of entire groups of people being slowly erased, dominated, and assimilated by the anglosphere mind is a concerning long term problem. You lose out on potentially beautiful things only people of that culture and “mind” are capable of creating/conceiving or nurturing. Also America’s dominance of cultural exports is insane.
English is a shit laguage but all the computers are programmed in it so fuck it we ball
English is such a shitty language the native speakers are bad at it 💀
Everyone is “bad” at their first language. No one speaks in a prim and proper way all the time. Slang forms, grammar is eschewed for convenience. If you are able to get your point across such that another competent speaker is able to understand, then you are good at speaking a language.
Oi watch it surrender monke or ill go n get me mate mocky the mouse
It’s pretty uncool to call them surrender monkeys when Christopher Nolan did you the favor of explaining how the French Army held the line so the English could run away.
Engliah is my second language and I only speak one.
Computers are programmed in programming languages. They do (most of the time) have English words as keywords, but changing them is trivially easy. You could have a “Esperanto C” working in a day. And changing a C program to Esperanto C would be trivially easy. The only problem would be the new keywords being used in the old program, but that’s easy to find and replace with a new identifier.
That there should be a global language not directly tied to a culture is one of the main arguments for an artificial launague being adopted as the global lingua franca. Not to say there isn’t issues with that either since the most popular constructed languages are heavily adapted from European languages (looking at you esperanto).
I would really love an international language with consistent spelling and where the spelling matches the pronunciation. For me the chosen language doesn’t have to be artificial, but the selection process should be: a scientific choice based on consistency, ease of learning, clarity in meaning, … Everyone who knows a few languages, knows English is probably the worst choice when it comes to these objective criteria.
It’s like the system of measurement: leave it to the people and we’d all still be using wacky thumbs, feet and elbows for measuring, but smart people came together in France (a few times) and now we have an easy to understand consistent system of measurement.
Arguably there have been languages like this such as polari which was spoken as a lingua franca amongst sailors at every port around the world.
Controversially would also suggest Modern London English and Pidgin English could also be modern examples.
I disagree. When i organised an international deaf week. It was very hard because i couldn’t speak with people from different countries in international sign language.
So if it doesn’t exist, people will either create a new one or use the dominant one. As for the culture, it depends.
“I out-colonized you”
L bozo get ratioed no balls no balls imagine losing in 1812 cope ez win saillll britinia sail cross fhe waves domdondomdomd don dob Don don
SPRICH DEUTSCH DU HURENSOHN!
context
Edit: since this gets quite a few downvotes, it’s an insider from a German subreddit and meant as a joke. I get how it can come across offensive without context, sorry for that. I hope I provided enough context now.
Now now grandpa, you tried that, it didn’t work
They’re just playing the long con
Ich spreche doch Deutsch…
Ich auch
…aber sehr schlecht
Don’t apologize for memes. Delete or own.
Always fun to find German words where the English equivalent fell into disuse. (Hurensohn = whoreson)
Hurensohn is the direct translation of “son of a b*tch” which is still quite frequently used last time I’ve checked
“Hurensohn” means “son of a whore,” and the English word “whoreson,” the direct equivalent, used to exist.
La France, le seul pays francophone bien evidemment
Québécois: Tabarnac…
Parler français c’est cool, je parle aussi italien, reste que l’anglais est plus pratique sur mon continent et pas mal dans tout les autres pays ou j’ai voyagé.
Je suis Americain et j’apprend le francais parce que je veux faire le tour du monde en volier, et la France d’outre-mer a beaucoup d’iles practiques.
(I only used DDG’s translator a little bit on that!)
I’ve heard that if you already speak English, then French is the best global second language to get because you can get by in so many Spanish speaking countries with English.
That’s also part of the reason why I picked it, although I’ve had a hard time finding the right data to support that hypothesis. It’s not as easy as asking what the most commonly-spoken languages are; instead, you’ve got to ask which language to learn next gets you the largest increment of being able to talk to more folks. That means you’ve got to subtract out the folks that speak language X but also language Y that you already accounted for, so to do it properly the data set you start with has to tell you which set of languages each individual person in the world speaks.
(Also, it’s almost certainly true that French is beaten out by Mandarin Chinese in terms of being the second language with the largest increment, but I picked French instead of Chinese to learn first because French speakers are distributed throughout the world, whereas most Chinese speakers are in China. And as you already noted for Spanish, it and Hindi lost out because even though they have more total speakers than French, the increment might not be as large because so many of them also speak English.)
Hmm … Think it might depend if you want the largest instrument of people or destinations. Mandarin might add a large instrument of people, but it’s not going to be that useful outside of China … and there are more English speakers in China than in the rest of the world.
I speak English, French and Italian. English is still by far the language that helped me most in South America.
Funny that it’s so widespread that a Germanic language was more useful than a fellow Romance one.
I guess it depends on your plans. If you plan on spending your time in Latin America then Spanish is still the obvious choice (spoken as French/English bilingual).
C’est assez amusant vu que l’accent britannique est assez difficile à comprendre pour des personnes qui ne sont pas natifs en anglais.
Je me souviens en Erasmus en république Tchèque on avait des cours d’aérodynamique en anglais.
Tout le monde arrivait à suivre sans trop de problème sauf une personne qui est allé se plaindre de la difficulté à suivre les cours à cause de la langue.
C’était un britannique, il avait réellement du mal à suivre le cours par un prof qui parlait du broken english avec un accent tchèque. En tant que français par contre aucun problème pour comprendre, je comprenait beaucoup plus facilement le prof tcheque que le britannique qui avait un fort accent londonien.
Moi c’etait la canadienne. Je voulais découvrir son accent, l’entendre, la comprendre (je suis sourd). Donc je lui ais posé une question. 😁 J’ai pas compris 😰 je lui ais demandé de repéter ☺️ puis j’ai abandonné et demandé d’écrire 🥺😭
C’était une sorte de franglais. 😅
Je suis italien et je comprends l’anglais mieux quand il est parlé par un français ou un autre locuteur non natif.
Oui. C’est très difficile.
We live in English speaking Australia. My son is learning French and Arabic.
There’s not many countries where you can’t get away with one of those languages, to my understanding.
Well if France wanted to have French be universal, they should’ve had a powerful culture!
@Blamemeta @ElCanut No, they should rework french with less gramatical rules ☺️
But but ouat of ze grammatical cultural exception?
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I support the linguist’s petition calling for reworking some french’s rule :) https://www.tract-linguistes.org/
Merci !
As a French speaker, we could do away with accents and absolute tons of silent vowels and consonants and French would still work exactly as well. People complain about English because more people learn it as a second language and these forums are anglo-centric, but French is just as much of a grammatical mess.
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Trust me, French is a different kind of mess. It’s mostly consistent in its messiness, English is exceptions from exceptions from exceptions. The really hard part about French is listening because it all sounds the same thanks to all the silent letters, but even then they still make reading easier.
Still. Thought 200 years of effort, french was made pretty uniformus. There is mosty minor accent difference that change across the french-speaking world. But during the same time the way we write stop to change even though the language evolved. So we have everyone how speak french the same way but write it in a way that obsolete since at least 150 years.
En même temps…
Har-har I out colonised you har-har toi parle anglais beacoup muhhahhahahahahahahahahhahahahHHahahahahahahahahhHahahahhHahhHHHHahahahahhahahahahahahahhHHa
“En Français!”
“Hohn-Hohn!”
I’m no surrender monkey mate fookin wot
You can also visit Quebec – but why would you want to?
Et dans l’anglais on y retrouve des mots du vieux francais. Sinon ya la version espagnol ? 😁
Speak spanish, visit Spain ? 😁
Engels zit ook vol met Oud Nederlandse woorden.
A coworker of mine suggested that Dutch is the easiest language to learn for native English speakers, so I’ve been learning it on the side for the past few months.
So is it easier ? I admit seeing dutch’s sentence is kinda overwhelming. I lend toward spanish or italiano 😅
It’s not really, it’s a fucked up language.
Why ?
Just the way sentences are constructed, the vocabulary, the fine nuances etc. Not to mention the pronunciation (though that’s where I’m personally doing the least bad).
Furthermore, there is a widely known issue with immigrants to the country never really learning the language due to a plethora of factors from the fact most Dutch people speak great English (so you don’t get practice), English being used as internal company language, and all the “infrastructure” stuff like taxes, administration etc being translated.
And how is immigrants integrations ? Do they find a pace in their society ?
So the message should be : learn old french and old Dutch > visit the world ☺️
Does French have an entire continent that speaks their language? South America would like a word.
