Yes yes. I English speak very easy. I English hear too very easy. Easy understand. Can talk each other good just simple words. English very good.
*Ahem*
Basically, the built-in error correction functionality in English is bloody phenomenal. Literally anyone with a passing understanding and skill in English can use it to communicate effectively. This feature is seldom seen in most other languages let alone lingua francas.
And there's no evidence that English is special in it's ability serve as a lingua franca. In previous eras, other languages held this role (e.g, French, hence the term "lingua franca").
The dominance of English can be far more certainly attributed to the geopolitical dominance of english-speaking nations...
> Yes yes. I English speak very easy. I English hear too very easy. Easy understand. Can talk each other good just simple words. English very good.
Pretty easy to “translate” that to a broken yet still understandable version of other languages.
Any evidence of a language being stamped out by a despot?
> You can say things like lingua franca and everyone knows what you’re talking about.
Considering that the phrase is Latin, I am not sure what your point is.
> There aren’t any pronouns that depend on social status.
And many other quirks that are as alien to a native Japanese speaker than this is to you, however.
> It’s got a phonetic alphabet
What? Are we still talking about English here? FFS.
> It’s just a natural choice for commerce and knowledge-sharing.
It’s really not. Like all languages that ended up in similar situation (e.g. French, Arabic, Mandarin, or Latin), it is a combination of good old fashioned imperialism and commercial links.
Many languages have been wiped out by genocides, and wiping out a language is a common explicit tactic in ethnic cleansings.
English has never been the source of a serious campaign of this regard, though.
Rather than rigidly fight against new influence, it took new words while retaining some of it's own. It does this constantly.
Even Chaucer's English is difficult to decipher for a modern English speaker, and that isn't even that old.
What you are describing is the standard process by which languages change. It's not accurate to equate this with the systematic elimination of a linguistic group through ethnic cleansing, something which English has never experienced.
Brazil had a couple of instances of that. In the 18th century, the Marquis of Pombal implemented a program to extinguish usage of Tupi as the national language and replace it with Portuguese. That was successful. And then a second iteration when the Italian, German and Japanese communities of speakers in South Brazil were prevented from speaking their languages around the time of World War 2. This was successful too.
Police document declaring it illegal to speak German, Italian and Japanese in public:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brazil_-_Proibido_falar_a...
Oh the irony!
The English tried to wipe out Gaelic use in Cornwall, Scotland, the Isle of Man and Ireland for centuries. Schools were told to punish children for speaking Gaelic, and to only speak English to their students. We succeeded in wiping out Cornish as a living language (sorry!). Manx and Irish Gaelic survived, though you can argue about Manx Gaelic (there was a revival around the time the last native speaker died).
Also, separately, your counterclaims are kind of... untrue? None of them are true of (e.g.) Mandarin which definitely served as a lingua franca for the ancient far east.
Source? On it's face this doesn't sound plausible...
I would bet that a part of it can probably be blamed more on Parisian being Parisian than on the French themselves :)
Oui oui. Je français parle très bien. Je entends français très bien aussi. Facile comprendre. Peux parler entre nous très bien juste mots simples. Français très bon.
Is just as understandable as the English original. French is much more forgiving than German in that regard, with a more flexible sentence structure. German and Russian the advantage of declension, which is a redundancy mechanism to indicate the role of a noun, but it’s an advantage over English just as much as over French. Also, it’s something a non-native will get wrong most of the time initially, so it’s not really helpful to help understand broken German.
Basically, I don’t think this is right and I tend to agree to “ many languages have this feature”, although I would say “most”.
In fact, many Creole language derived from French have this kind of simplified French structure as a core feature
French doesn't do this; as with English only the pronouns have vestigial accusative, and in any case most inflections are lost in speech because French drops consonants from the end of words. So you have to depend on strict word order to preserve meaning.
We have more special cases of past tense verbs and weird pronunciation, but I think it's easier to duck up and still make sense in English? Maybe.
English, by contrast, only has 8 regular inflections, across all parts of speech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection#Examples_in_English
English does have a rich ecosystem of compound verbs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_verb), but if this is taken to be part of the complexity of English verbs, I don't know how this stacks up to other languages.
Plus its orthography is ridiculously inconsistent, and a learner is never sure if they've got the right pronunciation when looking at a word because it's been caked over with N layers of different systems (Anglo-Saxon + Norse + Norman French + Latin + Greek etc)
I quit freelancing for a startup once because I missed half of their French English on meetings. Nowadays we have meetings with Mandarin Chinese and French and while a few of them have good English when others talk I give up.
Meanwhile with the same people native speakers from US and UK have no issues. I am amazed at how they can parse any gibberish thrown at them.
Did a fairly long trip in France, using as much French as I could. The speed of native French speakers meant comprehension was hard but manageable, and they seemed (almost intentionally at times), unable to make anything but what I would consider "travel French" work. I was fairly discouraged. I then met an Italian ski instructor who worked in France, and I could understand him quite well, and talked with him at a level (job, hobbies, family, reasons for travel) that I never achieved with a native speaker.
It was one of the most memorable moments of the trip and really gave me a feeling that we're all "citizens of the world" and not quite so divided by culture and lines on a map.
And young people learn to speak very quickly when they go to primary school (I don't know why).
Also there are lots of invented words by each generation like "wish" that you are ignorant if are not 10 years old.
I've travelled a bit, and learning to speak Global English is definitely a skill. My German wife is more understandable to the average SE Asian than I am, despite me being a native speaker. She uses less $5 words, and simpler sentence construction than I do. It's interesting (and a little galling) seeing my perfectly-constructed sentence fail to make any headway, while her simple English is immediately understood.
And yes, at times I've definitely reacted with "I understood that, but holy crap that was bad English". Whatever works I guess.
You just don't feel foreign language the way you feel own. Swearing in foreign language is just a word woth another meaning.
Not being bothered by bad grammar and what not is the same - butchered foreign language is not annoying nor more effort to understand. Butchered own language hurts ears the way foreign one does not.
I don't think so. Swear word is a swear word. It feels just as taboo to me.
I’m a non native speaker and it wasn’t until University when I met actual Americans that I realized my swearing could be ear-curling from time to time — I simply hadn’t noticed the reaction I got before in my life.
A simple example is the Swedish word “skit” and the English “shit”. In Swedish it’s actually pretty benign, for different reasons it’s not at all at the top of our swearing hierarchy: if you’d use “shit” in English in the same situations as you’d use “skit” in Swedish, English people will react.
So both in cases where there are cognates and a lack of actual experience with native speakers, there’s definitely a disconnect. I think any native speakers who have met good non native speakers have experienced this, they have 80-90% down but lack the cultural context (because where would it come from, movies isn’t enough)
But, when you swear in my language, I am bothered by it. It feels rude. Swearing in foreign language does not bother me at all. It does not feel rude.
Americans seem to struggle more than Brits. Perhaps it's because people in the UK are more used to strong Brittish accents and foreigners
I think this is currently pretty typical in any language.
In my experience, Non-native speakers are much more resilient to strong accents and broken grammar. Probably because they themselves passed by this step.
I worked in a research laboratory with >100 nationalities: It was extremely common to be at a table with a Greek, a Spanish and a Chinese perfectly understanding each other in some "Globish English" while the British or Australian next chair were crying in tears.