lingua franca

One of the largest and most influential language-shifts in global history could be traced back to the invasion of Europe by Attila the Hun. Before the Huns most of Europe spoke various Indo-European tongues with Latin being the prestige language; the Attila's hordes crushed most of the 5th...

Interslavic is a composite language promoted as a means of understandable communication between speakers of all Slavic languages. While at first glance it may sound modernistic, Interslavic is actually a few centuries old, with prototypes dating back to the 17th century. So, with that in mind...

What happens if Persian (or rather Farsi) ended up as lingua franca of the Middle-Eastern world, rather than Arabic? Persian is the second lingua franca of the Islamic world, in particular in the eastern region. Aside from serving as the state and administrative language in many Islamic...

With a POD after the fall of the Roman Empire and before the Industrial Revolution, could a language other than French have become the lingua franca of Europe, before English in the 20th century? Could Latin have become a serious spoken language outside of the Catholic Church and some...

With any POD, make it so that a creole forms between Portuguese and Hawaiian on the Hawaiian islands. How might this language look? Maybe something like Papiamentu, but with Hawaiian influence instead of Dutch, and influence from East Asian languages like Japanese and Mandarin? How would the...

Like would that language need to be spread around the world with several countries or would it need to be the language of the world's largest Economy? Are there other factors that could lead to a language becoming as popular as OTL English? I guess that basically I am asking what was the most...