G'day from Australia, please don't cut our borderless monolingual Island off. Kiwi's probably feel similar too.

The Lingua Franca didn't change because someone decided to change it, it slowly happened. You could argue it would be nice for EU if the (local) Lingua Franca would be the language of a large member state, but I don't see it happening by force. Probably better to just leave it to be English, even if the Irish are the only native speakers in the EU.

English if we want ease of communication (and is the most likely path forward)

Esperanto if the goal is to teach it to a whole generation: it is designed to be easy to understand when you already know one European language (especially a latin one I think?)

Chinese if the goal is to speak the language of the dominant non European power in the next century

Logical thinking I would think English should stay. It is by far the most known foreign language in Europe.

Anything but english or french. Yes, I'm willing to put up even with brainfuck as a spoken language

Lojban! Though esperanto maybe is more reasonable.

Question is, what should be the criteria for deciding which other language?

If it is for the sake of current global usability, English remains top.

If it is for geostrategic considerations, Spanish, French and Arabic would be the languages to cover South and Central America, large parts of Africa and West Asia.

If it is for population dominance inside the EU, it would be German, which probably will ruffle some feathers. If it is for population dominance in Europe, it should be Russian, which will ruffle a lot of feathers.

I'm too lazy to learn another language. Pick from English and Polish, alright?

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?

English has a blend of Germanic and Romantic features, which is nice for Europe, and no inflections to memorise, which is nice in addition. 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.

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

@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.

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.

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.

Latinam magnam iterum faciamus. 😎 🥂 🧐

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

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.

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