The Last Lingua Franca
English Until the Return of Babel
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
In this provocative and persuasive new book, Nicholas Ostler challenges our assumption that English will continue to dominate as the global lingua franca. Drawing on his encyclopaedic knowledge of world languages and their history, Ostler reveals that just as past great languages like Latin and Sanskrit have died out, so English will follow.
The influence of English now is hard to exaggerate - it is the world's preferred medium for business, science and entertainment, and is claimed to be a basic educational tool like mathematics or computing. So is it here to stay? For the last four centuries, the dominant world power has been English-speaking, but the global balance of power is shifting. And in countries like Brazil, Russia and China, English plays no part in the national tradition.
Although globalization has helped the rise of English, trade, migration, economic development and technological innovation are now changing the way we access and use language. Ostler shows how we are headed towards a much more multilingual and diverse future. And as English retreats, no single language will take its place.
We can embrace this future but first we need to accept it: the last competitive advantage of native English-speakers will soon be consigned to history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The days of English as the all-conquering international language of science, commerce, and hip-hop are numbered, according to this dense philological treatise. Linguist Ostler (Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin) recaps the rise and fall of lingua francas past from ancient Sanskrit and Latin to French in the 19th century to glean insights into how such languages spread by military conquest, trade, and missionary work then shrivel when the originating country loses prestige and power. He concludes from this retrospective that English will recede (though not die), and that no new lingua franca will supplant it sorry, Esperanto speakers! because translation software will let everyone communicate directly without learning a common language. Ostler uses English's fate mainly as a peg to hang a rather technical comparative study in which pedestrian generalities emerge from a thicket of historical minutiae. The interested layman will find the book readable, but the level of arcane detail about unfamiliar languages ("the characteristic ezafe construction of Persian noun phrases, which appends all dependents to the head noun with a linking i-or-e-, is copied in Chagatay Turkic") may put off the casual reader. 10 b&w illus.; 3 maps.
