It's because of the network effect. If you only know your local language and want to unlock speaking to the rest of the world when learning English gets you pretty far.

A lot of people start learning English because a lot of people speak English. Since now Europe, North America, half of Africa, Middle East, South Asia, Latin America, Oceania speak English to some extent that I know of.

It's absolutely bonkers how far English has gotten in one generation so learning anything else as a second language is pretty weird.

English has a blend of Germanic and Romantic features, which is nice for Europe, and no inflections to memorise, which is also nice. You could also argue that no grammatical gender is a positive feature.

On the downside, the orthography is ass, so maybe there should be a new EU-standard fonetik version. The contractions are confusing. A non-native speaker can maybe add some more, but that's all I've heard about.

@atro_city I remember a few years ago there was a French far-right group or something that proposed Latin to be the lingua franca instead, lol. But I haven't heard anything since.

Isn't the new official EU language irish English? I speak english with heavy german accent, can this be the ligua franca?

Latinam magnam iterum faciamus. 😎 🥂 🧐

Yes, next!

Ja, warum nicht Deutsch? Deutsch ist in Europa sehr weit verbreitet und wird von vielen Sprechern auch als Zweitsprache gesprochen. 😉

So, why is it English and not German? Because immigrants in the US decided to speak English. And there are so many people who can understand at least a few words in English. But as a German I'd prefer German, too. It is spoken by many Europeans.

Je suis désolé, chers Français, mon français est trop mauvais pour que je recommande que cela soit recommandé comme la principale chose européenne. 😂

I think we are at a point now where almost everybody in Europe is able to speak at least some English. So cultural exchange has never been easier. Why make it more difficult again by adding another language people have to learn first?

I'll laugh my ass off if it's French, I'll really have had the bilingual easy mode languages if that happens.

A lingua franca isn’t decided upon, it just happens to become one because of some power its speakers hold. In the Indonesian archipelago, Malay became a lingua franca because it was used by traders. In Europe, French was a lingua franca because French held a large amount of prestige among the European nobility. Now, English is the global lingua franca because English-speaking media have dominated the global media landscape.

If you want there to be another lingua franca in Europe, that language will somehow need to attain a good reason for it to become one. You can’t just pass a law proclaiming it now being ‘the lingua franca of Europe’.

Forcing people to speak eg. German by law might work, though you’ll probably have to be prepared to coerce people into actually doing so, and thus will have to ask yourself whether that’s worth it. Otherwise, there’s a good chance people will not really give a shit about your stupid law.

You could also maybe abolish all EU level accommodation for other languages than the official language in a new federalised Europe. Then, if you want anything done at that level, you have no choice but to use the official, non-English, language. This seems like it might spur an elitist environment where only a small layer of Europeans (outside of the country from which the speakers of the official language originate) will generally be able to speak that language.

This all seems a bit fantastical, though. Unless Europeans en masse stop consuming English language media, and at the same time start consuming the media of one specific other language (thus it’s a movement away from English and toward some other language by language users themselves), there won’t be a new lingua franca in Europe.

It's gonna be Chinese whether y'all like it or not.

English is a global lingua franca, not just european. And it's not just because of the american and british influence, but because it's a relatively easy language.

Also the translator programs are better and better, this is actually a good and fitting usecase of current LLMs. I think we are not far away from the babel fish.

It’s not possible to please everybody so I vote for Basque and pleasing nobody.

No, most people are pragmatic in this case and eastern countries changed from Russian ~30 years ago so another change isn't coming any time soon.

As my parents saw the change from "it is really appreciated that you can speak English" to "it is expected that you can use it". I can tell that it is so engrained in our multinational exchange that it won't be even desirable.

English is mostly used in commercial now, changing it would be costly and you would need the commitment of many others people to accept a new change in how to approach the world or just Europe, it's a tipe of commitment I doubt people would be willingly to accept.

let's all switch to Sumerian.

Would be great to switch to mandarin. /s for all you humourless.

Let's switch to (a) sign language.