I was discussing this topic in another thread and I got a lot of downvotes for suggesting that English will not forever be the world’s lingua franca. I’m not sure why people took such offence to this idea, I thought it was common knowledge that French would eventually surpass English (or even Mandarin) in terms of total users.
Anyway, I’ve linked the source of this projection. It’s a study/report from Natixis, a major corporate and investment bank (they were studying language growth to do some economic forecasting or whatever). The link to the report should be attached to this post (see page 2 for a summary, but there are subvariations of the projections and different graphs scattered all over the place in the report).
The reasoning is that most of the world is eventually going to start decreasing in population. But the world as a whole will still be growing in population. Why? Because Africa is currently experiencing a massive population boom, so the demographic weight of Africa is going to increase substantially (see, for example, the UN projections for world population growth). And of course the French language is widely spoken across Africa.
Now, is there room to critique this report? Absolutely. For instance, you could argue that it’s not fair to assume that Africa will continue to be predominately francophone; perhaps many African countries will move away from the French language now that the French colonial area is largely over. There is some movement in that direction. But regardless, this is a serious report, out of a serious institution, written by serious people. So the idea that French may surpass English a very real possibility, despite what some people seem to think.
My money would be on Mandarin but… Boy it’s a hard language. The English has a few quirks but it is an EASY language compared to most, including French. IMO, this and not number of native speakers or economic power alone explains best English overtaking French and establishing itself as de facto lingua franca of the 21st century.
Man, as a native English speaker, I totally disagree with this. We are, as I emphasized in another comment, a fucking mess phonetically, and a lot of this is ironically because English plundered so much from French (among other languages). So much of English you just have to “know” on a nearly case-by-case basis, and I imagine the internal systems I use to subconsciously keep track of these inconsistencies are a terrifying web of spaghetti. The conjugation is fucked six ways from Sunday, there are idioms out the ass (see the ones I’m unintentionally using here), there’s sooooo much slang, and there’s practically a bottomless pit of words – so much so (in combination with how common it is as a second language) that Wikipedia maintains a simplified English version using a list of only the 1000 most common words.
I can’t say I’ve learned French, but even accounting for how much I already accidentally know of it (knowing more obscure English words aids a lot in translation to the point I can often read sentences with knowing just a handful of basic French connective words), I’d bet it’s a ton easier. The main thing I’d hate, like I do with Spanish, is gendered nouns (god, they’re so fucking superfluous), but I’d still say it beats the weird peculiarities of English.
Most non-native speakers, to my understanding, would consider English quite hard to learn, even when factoring in all the English media they’re surrounded by growing up.
English didn’t plunder French; it absorbed a lot of French after the English crown became ruled by the French.
Sorry, I meant that for comedic effect; I understand that the English language isn’t an agent and that there was no singular instance where English went over, grabbed over 1/4 of its words from French, and came back. I know that “plundering” isn’t how language truly works. I do know about Old Norman’s influence on Middle English, I do know some about the Hundred Years’ War’s effect on its usage, I do roughly understand the Great Vowel Shift, and I have a fuzzy understanding thereafter. I guess I know that some political loanwords (like the 18th-century “bureaucracy”) and some cultural ones (like “boutique”) made their way into English, but I really don’t know much else.