UGHHHH!!! So I am taking I started college this semester and one of my classes is French. I tried to learn it in high school, to say the least I failed. My teachers kept on telling me, "Blaahh.. Blah... you need to know French to do anything outside of the United States or Britian... Blah... Blah... you need to know French to be in academia..." So apparently French is the "Lingua Franca" and has been since the 16th century. How could history have been different so I wouldn't need to know French, but a different language. French just has too many irregularities... how dare they say English took a lot of words from French. On a different note... how do you tolerate learning French...?
Butterflying the French and Indian Wars might help, I suppose; after all, it was that victory which helped the French solidify their control over the Illinois Country over the next quarter century afterwards(yes, even after the overthrow of the monarchy and with the rise of the Republic). And with that, it might also lead to a different United States as well. If the Patriots could seize all the British territory north of the Ohio River(whereas in OTL we just have Tippecanoe), then you might be able to create more free states after Independence; it is precisely due to slave states outnumbering free ones that caused slavery to last until almost the end of the 19th century(which only began to really end with the Great Panic of 1885 and the arrival of the boll weevil in 1890, even though overall profitability had been declining since 1875 or so); there, you might be able to end slavery by 1875, maybe even sooner.
How do I tolerate French, by the way? I'm from Tennessee so there's not many French speakers around(except Haitian blacks, mostly in Jefferson and thereabouts), but my mother has a large amount of Francophone ancestry from both (the state of) Louisiana and (the Laurentian province of) Quebec so I did have some extra motivation to learn it.
Mais la Francais n'est pas tres difficile!
Its the Royal Society for the Protection of English, and its US equivalent that make me laugh. Flying Machine instead of Avion, Cold Storage Unit instead of refrigerateur, Horseless Carriage instead of voiture!!( OK car is the slang term for the last one but apparently its still not proper English).
Its time we got over it and learned French; everyone else does.
We call automobiles cars just fine here in the U.S.(though voiture is also an acceptable alternative in northern New England, Louisiana, and the "Indian Belt" in Kentucky and Missouri); in fact, hardly anyone uses "Horseless Carriage" anymore anywhere in the Anglophone world, even the very elderly....even in Scotland.
How can you have the Lingua franca be a different language from French? It certainly wouldn't be called Lingua Franca if that was the case!
(Alas, all I can do is ask awkwardly 'Parlez-vous chinois?')
That would certainly make English a lot more influential but I don't think it's enough to make it a Lingua Franca. The central and South American countries would still speak Spanish and France would still have a major foothold in India which would still pave the way for French dominance in China and Japan.
That by itself might not be, true. But Britain did have potential to be a truly global empire even then and things could certainly have been better for them even after the American Revolution.
In fact, if anti-French sentiment still becomes a major thing in China(as it did in many areas IOTL, and in fact, it is still illegal to speak French in Beijing to this day), a more powerful Britain may just be able to really exploit that. And in terms of India, do remember that the Indians, too, have always been warmer towards the Brits than they ever were the French or even the Portuguese; in fact, did you know that England proper is almost 15% Indian today, and that curry is considered to be Britain's other national dish? Whereas only 3.5% of French citizens are even of partial Indian ancestry, and Hindi was actually widely discouraged even in private, until the early 20th century in some spots.