At least you speak the truth.

Wrong on both counts. English is indeed better understood in these northern European countries than in other places like Vietnam and Korea (where if anything you’ll increasingly hear them use some simplified version of Chinese). But even in more English-proficient northern Europe, their English is halting at best.

I remember there was a deal being made by a Belgian company representative and a group from Denmark, related to work in my field. They both tried to use English to communicate to each other, but neither party to the talks could actually communicate well in English, and they both wound up messing it up and totally miscommunicating. Ultimately, they just got their contracts translated into each other’s languages (Flemish and Danish in this case) and held the talks through interpreters, which was much cheaper.

FWIW, the EU *does not have* a single official language– it’s definitely not English. The EU has multiple working languages, with the big dogs being French, German and English of course. But if anything, in the EU, German is the chief language– it has by far the highest number of native speakers, and a very large sphere of influence in both eastern and northern Europe. They have a lot of clever tricks, and lots of nifty auto-interpreters that are getting better, but there’s no one official language there. To the extent that there’s a “critical language” of the EU, it’s German.

Interestingly, this has already changed very fast. I do a lot of projects in India, and besides the fact that the masses basically don’t use English at all, even the more educated classes increasingly are doing their learning in an Indian language. This is usually Hindi, but occasionally Tamil in the south– another prestige language in the Subcontinent. When they talk to each other (north and south), they *don’t use English*, it’s a not a link language there if it ever was one, they use some variant of Hindi with a ton of Tamil and local-language flavor added in.

In some parts of South India you can still hear a good deal of French. And for whatever reason, I’ve found more and more Indians gravitate toward doing professional work in German– it’s an important, technical prestige language like English, but w/o the colonial baggage that English regrettably still has, linked to the British Empire that did untold nasty things in India. So India has plenty of choices.

“In L.A., many Koreans choose Spanish as their second language for running their small stores.”

Yeah, noticed this too. I would not try to business in California, let alone in Arizona, Texas, NM without knowing some Spanish. In that region, it really is essential, fortunately very easy to learn.

There is *enormous* debate about that. If we count native speakers, then English is possibly not even in the Top 3. Mandarin Chinese is #1 by leaps and bounds, but many studies show Spanish and Hindi both exceeding English on this front, with Arabic not too far behind.

And secondary speakers? First of all, the vast majority of those “secondary speakers” can’t actually communicate even with slight ability in English. If you’ve ever gone to give a talk in a place like Russia, Japan, Brazil, Vietnam, China, most of India– yes, even including India outside a few of the big city hubs– it is very difficult to find competent English-speakers anywhere. Even in the lodgings of all places, nobody actually speaks English! Many may have taken some English courses, but they cannot use the language for actual communication, and when they do write or talk about something important, they do so in their own languages.

IOW, English is vastly exaggerated as a lingua franca– there are lots of regional lingua francas throughout the world depending on whoever’s trading with whomever, but English really is not as widely used as people pretend.

Besides, these days in Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, even increasingly in the Philippines, the craze is to learn Mandarin Chinese, not English, and in Singapore, Chinese is starting to get the upper hand. (Forget about HK– whatever its past British links, those links are long past, people do not use English there.)

Going to Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, Slovakia, Finland, the Ukraine? Then learn German, it’s more useful than English there. For that matter, if you’re a techie of any sort, especially sending something for publication, German is a key feather in the cap and a good one to get noticed in.

And Spanish? A passport through almost the entire Western Hemisphere, more so than English is.

As for why so few people even in elite circles actually speak or write good English– I’d venture a lot of it has to do with how ridiculously difficult English really is to master. We probably have the most non-intuitive writing system for any modern alphabetical language. In many other languages, you can read a word on the page and, once you know the basic rules, immediately know how it’s pronounced– German is like this, even more so with Spanish and Italian. They’re very consistent.

English OTOH is just a mishmash, a total jumble for non-native speakers, and if they see a word on the page, they have no idea how to pronounce it. English writing has very little internal consistency, with exceptions and alterations if anything exceeding the # of rules. And English grammar is all over the place, with weird phraseologies, trouble with misplaced modifiers, strange tense formations (why has a teacher “taught” while a preacher hasn’t “praught”?), nonsensical compounds that are basically oxymorons, confusing ways of changing subjects and predicates around.

IOW, English in some ways is least-suited to being a central language of any kind. Someone smarter than me on history could maybe give a reason, obviously English and German both sprouted from the same root, English had all that French and Latin tossed in too. But you see that French also in places like Dutch and Romanian, but they’re more internally consistent. Why English got so discombobulated from the experience, I couldn’t possibly say.

So overall, I don’t know how to get past this problem. I’d probably start picking up Mandarin Chinese, or Spanish if you’re in a place like California, or German if you’re a technical sort. Or maybe we’ll bring back straight Latin as a standard, it’s something like neutral since nobody uses it. Or we can just get better at fast translating. But English is nowhere near a global lingua franca.

Lingua franca I’m very familiar with now, though I admit to not, by any means, being an expert on The Adamic Language (though highly interested in the study of it). Likewaise the paper did not discuss the Adamic lanugage to any detail (only briefly mentioned) as it was not a religous paper.

I just did a research paper for a professional writing course at my university, on a very very similar topic (“English should be the global language”)(English (and it’s various forms I must add)also happens to have the largest vocabulary, and it’s the fastest growing language in the world)

Eng is coming up on obtaining it’s 1 millionth word. Russian is next in vocabulary (some 800,000)(though many conjugations of other words already counted)

It is said that the Adamic language is a perfect language. One where there is no “loss of words” you will not have to say “I don’t know how to explain it.”
This means Adamic should potentially have the highest vocabulary, and therefor be the most descriptive. As Eng is morphing and encompassing so many other parts of other cultures it has become the closest we have to Adamic on the planet.

English’s advantage is it doesn’t care, and it easily adapts (consumes) parts of other languages and makes it it’s own easier than any other language on the planet.

To end this little tid bit (sorry for the tangeant, but this post reminded me of this)
In Latin “Lingua Franca” at one time referred to French as a pure mother tongue, yet now ironically it is commonly used to referr to English, which is the most impure language.

I can post the research paper if liked for scrutinizing

Likewise, English will remain the lingua franca in the LDS Church because power in the Church emanates from Temple Square, where English is the native language.