AHC: Make a non Indo-European language become the global Lingua Franca

Why would Iberia become berber speaking after 1300?

Basque becoming dominant is unlikely, at best you could have them be more presented overall and a even bigger influence on Castillian and Aragonese.

Dravidian resurgence seems unlikely, not even with Maharashtra, Orissa and other surrounding territories the population would still be smaller than the Indo-Aryan portion.
Instead of Arabic absorbing Berber speakers, the Berber languages remain strong and dominant in the Maghreb. During the Islamic conquest of Iberia, Iberia get's linguistically Berberified. Nothin of this is after 1300 AD.
 
Overall, the prospects are pretty dim for a non-Indo-European language to be the lingua franca post 1300 AD. Nothing but an utter wank of some culture can possibly work.
I’m surprised you talked about the Japanese and the Finns when there’s the elephant in the room—China.With China,you don’t need a wank—you only need to avoid some of the screws,naming the Ming Dynasty or how the Ming Dynasty collapsed just as it became commercially powerful.
 
Esperanto is technically non-Indo-European (nor is it a member of any other language family), as it's a constructed language. Continuing on this theme, it's difficult but not impossible to imagine some sort of constructed language becoming the global lingua franca.
Although Esperanto is technically not Indo-European, its grammar and vocabulary are both derived from Indo-European languages and I don't really think it fits the spirit of the challenge. Some other constructed language could potentially be a lingua franca, but it is difficult to see unless there really isn't anything else suitable.

As for Chinese, it's definitely the leading candidate, but it has the problems of a complicated written language and a tonal spoken one. The former can be worked around or replaced with an alphabet or a syllabary (cf. Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese), but there's not much to be done about the latter, which could make it hard enough for speakers of non-tonal languages to learn that it can't quite manage to be a global lingua franca. Perhaps a constructed atonal variety of Chinese? Arabic is also in the running, but by 1300 its best opportunities are behind it and you'd probably need something drastic like reversing the Reconquista and taking a major role in colonization of the New World. Maybe some Turkic or Mongol khanate manages to form a really large, long-lasting empire that speaks its language? Beyond that, it's mostly a matter of taking some relatively minor language (ex. Finnish, Japanese, Tamil) and constructing a scenario where it gets spoken by a powerful, influential empire that spreads it everywhere.
 
English didn’t become the world language because its dental fricatives are so easy to pronounce and its lexical stress so easy to master.
Yeah, the difficulty of the language often has no relation to how many people speak it as their mother tongue; that is determined by, well, their mother (aka their environment growing up).

As for learning a new language, economic pressures and prestige tend to outweigh ease of learning, at least before modern education really took off. If a language allows economic opportunities or sophistication (French pre-Revolution and English nowadays), it'll get picked up, even if it's way different from one's mother tongue.
 
As @Augenis said, Chinese (a southern dialect of Mandarin, not our modern Beijing standard) is by far the easiest answer. Followed by Arabic, even though this would require a little earlier POD -- a POD too late in Islamic history will result in Persian being the secular lingua franca, not Arabic

Or Turkish ;)
Harder, but a sufficiently wanked Ottoman Empire might do.
 
Also, I am surprised nobody yet mentioned Malay. It emerged as a local trading lingua franca IOTL, if an Indonesian empire emerges with strong and lasting power (based on naval and trading dominance) it may work. Perhaps not the easiest path, but it seems a decent candidate to me. While as noted ease of learning really does not count for much relative to prestige factors, Malay has that element working heavily in its favor as well.
 
Scenarios where Ugro-Finnic languages are strong in number of speakers within Europe could work. If Slavs could be overwhelmed by their neighbors, it would be a good start.
 
Scenarios where Ugro-Finnic languages are strong in number of speakers within Europe could work. If Slavs could be overwhelmed by their neighbors, it would be a good start.

Probably won't happen with 1300 being the earliest PoD. Slavs just had too vast a demographic advantage on Finno-Ugric speakers by that point.
 
Probably won't happen with 1300 being the earliest PoD. Slavs just had too vast a demographic advantage on Finno-Ugric speakers by that point.
What if some wars of conquest go very poorly for the Slavic princes, and the city-states end up falling? Although, the counterattacks would have to involve large-scale massacres/subjugation.
 
What if some wars of conquest go very poorly for the Slavic princes, and the city-states end up falling? Although, the counterattacks would have to involve large-scale massacres/subjugation.
Very, very hard to do after 1300.
Of course, you can contrive a scenario where Turkic or Mongolian groups establish a sort of dominance over Eastern Europe after 1300 resulting in their language being dominant over much of the modern Slavic-speaking areas. But that would neither fill the OP in itself, nor make the area any more Finno-Ugric.
 
IMHO the issue is that in Europe, or most of it, you had Latin as the language of the Church and the educated for a long time after the Roman Empire went away. This meant that something based on Latin was going to be easier to be a lingua franca. Written records (bills of lading, credit documents, etc) are part and parcel of a lingua franca. With Chinese, not only is written Chinese extremely difficult, but culturally there was no push to simplify it - the educated classes retained wealth and privilege because only they were adequately literate given the effort it took to become literate. One reason why at some point the Koreans invented the written form of Hangul, which is like the Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic etc alphabets, phonetic. Another strike against Chinese is to reverse the overall policy of non-exploration/expansion - let the barbarians come to the Celestial Kingdom to trade, not the other way around.

I can't peak to tonal languages, but IMHO even with poor grammar you can make yourself understood in a non-tonal language than with a tonal one - and even today spoken Chinese is difficult between regions after a lot of effort to standardize it. Yeas, English has a lot of weird stuff, but my experience is that non-native speakers, even with bad accents and poor grammar can be understood a lot easier in English than many other non-tonal languages.
 
One of the Turkic languages. With religion, a Turkic Chingiz Khan might create a global-spanning empire that stays longer.
Tamil, in an Indian-subcontinent’s age of discovery.
Hokkien
Aramaic.
 
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