4 ms·

It is still the current lingua franca for most of Earth. Most of their populations learn English as a 2nd (or 3rd) language. It's no different then past legisl

• caiob 9y ago
  Hmm... if we're picking a lingua franca for the Earth, that would have to be Mandarin (~14% of the world's population speak it)
  • Arcten 9y ago
    For such a "lingua franca" the pure number of speakers is not quite as relevant as the distribution of those speakers. According to the numbers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...), approximately 14% of the world speaks English as a first or second language as well. More importantly, English has 400 million more speakers who speak it as a second language when compared to Mandarin, which suggests that its speakers are more widely distributed on Earth.
    • 3pt14159 9y ago
      While I agree with your viewpoint and it stands up on it's own, I also think it's important to remember the number of people that know at least 20 or 100 words of English. Simple statements can help at a lot of places, whereas I only know a single Chinese word. The number of people that can say basic numbers in English or very simple statements is much higher.
  • adrianN 9y ago
    In how many countries can you travel and reasonably expect to get by with just Mandarin?
  • Tuna-Fish 9y ago
    No. The proportion of the world's population that speaks English is greater than the proportion that speaks Mandarin. Mandarin is the language most spoken as the first language (and that's actually very debatable). This is irrelevant for choosing a language for people to speak with each other.