You know, if these countries really want to economically hurt the US, they should switch to French or Dutch as lingua franca. All this shit would stop quick.
Why? Not going to happen, but the EU could declare right now that Esperanto would be the official lingua franca within 5 years, and begin immediately teaching it to both kids and adults. In less than 10 to 20 years english could be entirely replaced by a much more regular and easier to learn and pronounce language.
An official language is not a lingua franca. A lingua franca is a bridge language. It is –and can only be– the most common shared language between native tounges.
They could add Esperanto as the official language for government beuraceacy, road signs, laws, public schooling and anything else under the purview of the state. That doesn’t automatically expand the utility of the language beyond those use cases.
The population of the EU is ~450 million people. Let’s look at how that stacks up against language demographics today (combined first+second languages for 2025):
English 1.5B
Mandarin 1.2B
Hindi 609M
Spanish 558M [the biggest non-english European tounge]
If we take out the EU’s 44% English speakers and make everybody speak Spanish (who doesn’t already):
English 1.3B
Mandarin 1.2B
Spanish 931M
Hindi 609M
So putting aside the logistical and diplomatic difficulties, the math just doesn’t add up.
You know, if these countries really want to economically hurt the US, they should switch to French or Dutch as lingua franca. All this shit would stop quick.
Why would they pick Dutch, it has all the complexity of English with non of the native speakers.
Spanish should probably be the top of the list if we’re throwing English out.
You can’t just declare a lingua franca 😂
Why? Not going to happen, but the EU could declare right now that Esperanto would be the official lingua franca within 5 years, and begin immediately teaching it to both kids and adults. In less than 10 to 20 years english could be entirely replaced by a much more regular and easier to learn and pronounce language.
An official language is not a lingua franca. A lingua franca is a bridge language. It is –and can only be– the most common shared language between native tounges.
They could add Esperanto as the official language for government beuraceacy, road signs, laws, public schooling and anything else under the purview of the state. That doesn’t automatically expand the utility of the language beyond those use cases.
The population of the EU is ~450 million people. Let’s look at how that stacks up against language demographics today (combined first+second languages for 2025):
If we take out the EU’s 44% English speakers and make everybody speak Spanish (who doesn’t already):
So putting aside the logistical and diplomatic difficulties, the math just doesn’t add up.