inek
Banned
Afaik the USA at the founding had a referendum about which language to use and German was a very close second. Flip that and the butterflies are immense...
Which criteria does a language need to meet in order to be a lingua franca?
- Thread starter Vitalis
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TheSwedishHistorian
Banned
Speaking about a criterion for a lingua franca makes little sense. It all depends on what language two people have in common and thus try to speak. A swede and a Finnish person might speak English with each other, even though Swedish and Finnish is their respective mother tongue.
English, French, etc, is big lingua Francas in many parts of Africa where a plethora of languages rules. English is a lingua franca in India which has many mother tongues. Mandarin is a lingua Franca in China, as the chosen language to make the standard.
High German is the lingua franca in some ways in Germany, as the chosen dialect. Tuscan Italian was the one for Italy.
English, French, etc, is big lingua Francas in many parts of Africa where a plethora of languages rules. English is a lingua franca in India which has many mother tongues. Mandarin is a lingua Franca in China, as the chosen language to make the standard.
High German is the lingua franca in some ways in Germany, as the chosen dialect. Tuscan Italian was the one for Italy.
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In the Russian Empire you probably had better chance of meeting someone speaking Polish than German,forthe obvious reason it controlling most of Poland and Poles often engaging in activities that led to Tsar-sponsored holidays in Siberia
Which, btw, for some time was the local lingua franca in the area as well
As others have said, you can have different lingua francas (linguae francae?) in different fields -- a trade lingua franca, a diplomacy lingua franca, a scholarly lingua franca (sometimes even different lingua francas for different branches of scholarship...), etc.
In general, to get your language to become a lingua franca, you need to make your country important enough in a particular field of endeavour that anybody who wants to seriously participate in that field would find it helpful to speak your language. Another good alternative is to have your language used by religious institutions -- so, for example, Latin remained the Western European scholarly lingua franca for a good millennium (and in some fields, even longer) after it ceased being used as a day-to-day language, thanks largely to use by the Catholic Church; Standard Arabic is based heavily on the Classical Arabic of the Koran; and so on.
IIRC, the actual story is that some German-Americans petitions to have Acts of Congress published in German as well as English. Congress voted on the matter, but decided against it.
More than German BTW, while there were German settlements as far as Volga valley, German was not used by non-Germans in Russian Empire to communicate with other non-Germans. Polish was (Belarusian and Lithuanian peasants used Polish to communicate, as it was language they both knew as L2).