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.
Yeah, if there’s a new lingua franca in 25 years (which would be strange, because the proliferation of increasingly highly accurate LLM translation would seemingly add pressure in favor of whatever the status quo is), I would bargain on Mandarin. And that’s if, which I seriously doubt – even assuming the US completely fucks up the next 20 years as badly as the last 10 and China dominates the world economy by a vast margin. English is one of the hardest major languages to learn; ironically, the globalism that let it proliferate arguably isn’t helping a total beginner as English increasingly pulls in loanwords.
What’s a language that’s even harder to learn? Mandarin. English is a fucking mess phinetically, but at least it doesn’t have tens of thousands of characters and an extreme emphasis on particular intonation. Japanese has kanji, sure, but there’s a foundation in the form of kanas which are easy to learn and are phonetic. Especially with English entrenched as a secondary language, pivoting to teaching Mandarin would need an enormous incentive compared to China’s incentive to just, like, use an LLM to translate messages etc. bound to non-Madarin-speaking countries.