The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel

by Nicholas Ostler

English is the world's lingua franca-the most widely spoken language in human history. And yet, as historian and linguist Nicholas Ostler persuasively argues, English will not only be displaced as the world's language in the not-distant future, it will be the last lingua franca, not replaced by another.
Empire, commerce, and religion have been the primary raisons d'etre for lingua francas--Greek, Latin, Arabic have all held the position--and Ostler explores each through the lens of civilizations spanning the globe and history, from China and India to Russia and Europe. Three trends emerge that suggest the ultimate decline of English and other lingua francas. Movements throughout the world towards equality in society will downgrade the status of elites--and since elites are the prime users of non-native English, the language will gradually retreat to its native-speaking territories. The rising wealth of Brazil, Russia, India, and China will challenge the dominance of native-English-speaking nations--thereby shrinking the international preference for English. Simultaneously, new technologies will allow instant translation among major languages, enhacing the status of mother tongues and lessening the necessity for any future lingua franca.
Ostler predicts a soft landing for It will still be widely spoken, if no longer worldwide, sustained by America's continued power on the world stage. But its decline will be both symbolic and significant, evidence of grand shifts in the cultural effects of empire. The Last Lingua Franca is both an insightful examination of the trajectory of our own mother tongue and a fascinating lens through which to view the sweep of history.

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction, History, Social Science, Religion, Science

352 pages, Hardcover

First published November 23, 2010

About the author

Nicholas Ostler is a British scholar and author. Ostler studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received degrees in Greek, Latin, philosophy, and economics. He later studied under Noam Chomsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his Ph.D. in linguistics and Sanskrit.

His 2005 book Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World documents the spread of language throughout recorded human history.

His 2007 book Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin looks specifically at the language of the Romans, both before and after the existence of their Empire. The story focuses on the rise, spread, and dominance of Latin, both among other languages of the Italian peninsula in the early part of the 1st millennium BC and among the languages of Western Europe in the Dark Ages and beyond, presenting the life of Latin as any biographer would present the life of his subject. With this book, Ostler provides a strong argument against the label 'dead language' so often assigned to Latin. However, the title, 'Ad Infinitum,' refers not to this, but to his thesis that the Latin-speaking world was unconscious of its own limits, looking always back to its centre, rather than outwards.

He is currently the chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, and lives in Bath, England.

Reviews

[Kara Babcock · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, don’t I feel all unoriginal. Here I was, prepared to critique this book’s extremely dry, technical style … only to read some of the other reviews on Goodreads and discover it is almost universally remarked upon. There goes that approach!

To be fair, I was going to moderate my criticism by pointing out that if you are studying linguistics or have anything more than the passing interest in it that I do, then The Last Lingua Franca is the book for you. It could be a textbook for a linguistics class. Nicholas Ostler doesn’t just opine; he brings it: facts and charts and footnotes and endnotes and everything you could possibly want from an academic text. The prose is careful and precise enough that it verges at times like reading like a full-on academic paper. Did not expect that from a guy with a hair-do like the one in his author photograph (just goes to show you can’t judge someone based on their author photograph).

None of these are negatives. In fact, we should hope that more books could be as precise as this one, that more authors should refuse to bow to the sensationalist populism that occasionally infects the most well-meaning science writers. If anything, this should just prompt a discussion about the relationship between the readability and density of prose versus the benefit one gets from the information it contains. Ostler goes into incredible detail about the history and spread not just of languages but of the cultures and societies that used them. I learned a great deal about the Middle East, India, and Asia that I didn’t know before, even as I skimmed over probably twice as much.

One consequence—probably not primary but almost certainly intentional—of Ostler’s inexorable display of erudition is a reminder of our Eurocentric worldview in the West. This is particularly a problem for education. I learned a lot about Western history, or history from a Western perspective, in school. My knowledge of the timelines and scales for events like the advent of Islam, rise and fall of the Mughal and Ottoman Empires, etc., is scattered at best. These just aren’t things that we learn about in school, yet of course, Asia had its own dramatic history before Britain and the Netherlands spread their trade empire into its corners. So, good on Ostler for jolting me out of my comfortable Eurocentric wolrdview.

The history lesson is a bonus, but like I said, it didn’t hold my interest all that much. I was not expecting Ostler to get that technical about what makes the various languages tick. Maybe I should have. Reviews that reduce Ostler’s main argument to “machine translation will obviate the need for any lingua franca” are on the right track. I understand the criticisms that this last part is rushed considering it seems to be the thesis of the book. However, I agree with Ostler that a survey of the historical use and spread of lingua francas is essential to understanding how English, as the current dominant lingua franca across the world, might change in the future. Until we have a more rigorous and well-founded understanding of the history of languages, we can’t really form good opinions on what their futures might be.

So the history lesson is not just a bonus but an essential component of The Last Lingua Franca. And depending on your tolerance for the technical detail behind components of language, you’ll love it or be lukewarm towards it. But what of the main event, this discussion of the future of lingua francas and the celebration of our Robot Overlords?

I agree with those who find this section short considering it is, you know, the title of the book. Ostler could have spent just as much time exploring the history of machine translation attempts as he did on the history of Persian and Latin. He could delve into the intricacies of information theory, and actually explain how natural-language processing works. Instead he gives a half-hearted rendition of ASCII and Unicode’s inception. Then he claims that machine translation will eventually be “good enough” to serve as a lingua franca.

Here I’m inclined to be more charitable than others. Ostler’s argument here is not overly optimistic. For one thing, he’s right: machine translation is approaching the point where, in many situations, it is good enough—and that’s only going to get better. I know it’s easy to laugh at the stupid mistakes Google Translate or its cousins makes, but once upon a time we never thought these “computers” would be good for much. Technology continually surprises us, so I’m not going to bet against machine translation.

Speaking of which, Ostler could have spent more time looking at projects that involve technology and language. Crowdsourcing offers a vast potential for augmenting machine translation. Projects like Global Voices aim to make news from around the world accessible in over 30 languages. Such efforts could well contribute to removing the need for a lingua franca in much the same way machine translation would. If machine translation continues to get better, and crowdsourcing continues to become easier to do … well, there’s lots of possibilities.

In some ways, The Last Lingua Franca feels like two books awkwardly combined. The first could survive without the second; Ostler serves up an admirable history of lingua francas. The second requires the first, however—but it’s not itself very deeply developed or interesting. And that’s a shame, because it should be the shining moment for this book.

Ostler’s research and knowledge in this field is clearly impressive. The Last Lingua Franca is well-written, albeit in a tone that requires patience and careful attention. He certainly educations and opens eyes. But there are missteps along the way that make the book less successful than it might otherwise be.

[Nicky · Rating 2 out of 5]

My interest in languages and lingua-francas should be obvious. I'm a Welsh person who grew up in England and only really discovered my own country's culture when living there, doing a course in Welsh literature, through the medium of English (and it doesn't escape me that I did this module on a course called English Literature). I don't speak my mother-tongue -- and Welsh should've been my mother-tongue: only a generation ago, all my family spoke it and didn't learn English until secondary school; that, and Welsh has words for things I feel for which there is no English translation (hiraeth). Then there's the fact that the person I'm showing every sign of spending my life with is actually speaking to me in her third language, and finds my attempts at speaking French laughable and would probably wince if I tried to pronounce Dutch. Meeting her family, we use English as a lingua-franca in practice, and I even bought this very book, in English, in a bookshop in Brussels.

Unfortunately, despite all that interest and my academic background to boot, I found this book very dense and dry. Statistics and technicalities abound; the influence of colonialism and imperialism acknowledged but not considered as much as I'd like. It's an interesting topic, although I'm not sure about some of the ideas (can machine translation ever really replace human translation? Having done translation work from French, Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic, myself -- hell no!). Execution is just a bit dull if statistics and such aren't your thing. The historical stuff is interesting, though.

[Ed Erwin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dull, dry and tedious, with more focus on ancient history than current events, and a conclusion that is not supported by the text.

In order to discuss the fate of English as a Lingua Franca, it makes sense to precisely define that term (which is done in the first few chapters) and it makes sense to study the fate of past lingua francas (which is done in most of the rest of the book.)

After that, one could make an intelligent argument about what might happen to English as a Lingua Franca in the future, based on what we can learn from the history of others. But that isn't what is in this book. The final conclusion is that machine translation, while not very good right now, will in the next 50 or 100 years make it unnecessary for anyone to speak in anything but their mother tongue.

To support that idea, you'd need to give evidence that the problems of machine translation and of computer parsing of natural speech are solvable problems. Maybe they are, but that isn't at all the sort of evidence presented. That conclusion just comes out of thin air after an unrelated lead-up.

I forced myself to read through long, tedious discussion of the history of wars and regimes in Persia and Africa, and discussion of Persian, Sogdian, Turkic languages with the belief that there would be some pay-off at the end of the book to make it worth my time. But there isn't one.

If you are interested in history for its own sake, this might be for you. But it has nothing much to say about the fate of English, and not much to say about language in general.

(Kudos to the editor and typesetter, though. There are so many different scripts in use, including ancient ones, and so many foreign words and names, that their tasks must have been quite difficult. And I have no doubt the author knows what he is talking about for the historical info.)

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is so densely and dryly written that I had a hard time getting through it. I kept at it though because I was curious to find out his opinion as English as a lingua franca. (I guess that linguist/ESOL teacher in me was interested!) I'm not sure it was worth my time. I could have just read the first and third sections and skipped the middle section entirely. His answer? Yes, English is going to retreat into the background as Hindi/Urdu, Chinese, Portuguese (because of Brazil), and Russian become more important. The primary reason why he thinks English is going to cease being useful as a lingua franca is that because of electronic translation, the world is not going to need a common language of trade/business/diplomacy anymore. There, you don't have to read the book. (Unless you're really into the history of languages, primarily Latin, Persian, and Sanskrit. If you are, you'll probably, potentially, enjoy this book.)

[Daan · Rating 3 out of 5]

"By the middle of this century, a global lingua-franca will no longer be needed. Language technology will take care of interpreting and translation, and foreign-language learning will be become an unnecessary chore."
"International English will tend to die out, and English, like modern Greek, will find itself thrown back on heartlands where it is spoken natively."

Interesting ideas that make me wonder whether I belong to the last generation of human translators.

However, I would be surprised if that would be the case. Machine translation has a long way to go!

[Kelly Korby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really only for the language enthusiast. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but it is admittingly somewhat dry, almost textbook style.

[Andrew Fish · Rating 2 out of 5]

The English language is unquestionably dominant across our modern world. Whilst Chinese may boast more speakers, no other language has the reach or the cultural clout. But will it last? Nicholas Ostler thinks not, and by examining the lives of other lingua francas he intends to show the patterns which lead languages to rise and fall, whilst simultaneously questioning whether a lingua franca is necessary at all.

It's an interesting idea, which is what drew me to the book in the first place, but unfortunately, in Ostler's hands it reads like a rather dry dissertation. And like many such studies, it suffers from having the conclusion all worked out before the research began. Much as with lifeforms, languages are subject to a form of natural selection: the forces of history create an environment in which they rise or fall, but as with life, some languages adapt better than others. Ostler manages to look at the environmental factors without looking at the languages themselves. English is a magpie language, never afraid to steal ideas from others, giving it by far the largest vocabulary of any language living or dead. It also has a flexible grammar (so much so that native speakers often forget it's there) which lends it to formulations far beyond most other languages. In his earlier book on Latin, Ostler identifies the decline of that language as having much to do with its rigidity and inability to adapt. Oddly, in this book, he ignores that finding, instead assuming that the decline of a language is purely based on the political and economic environment. Despite his own admission that the age of empires is probably gone for good, he still thinks the forces this unleashed on languages remain significant.

In technology, too, Ostler is a one-eyed man. He preaches the gospel of machine translation as only a man without computer programming skills could, but fails to regard the significance of other technology such as film and recorded music, both of which give English a reach and resonance broader and more popularly based than any earlier language. The post-imperial nationalism that leads some countries to cling to their own language in preference to a language tainted with political dominance may resonate at the moment, but it's hard to believe that if Hollywood is still as successful in a hundred years, a younger generation would boycott the undubbed version of whatever the twenty-second century provides as its generation's Jurassic World based on a vague sense of historical indignation.

Yes, things can be translated, and it's possible that - most of the time - a computer could do a rough job (although Ostler admits that with more nuanced work even the best human translators get things wrong) but translation isn't only about understanding. The beauty of Shakespeare's work is not just about plot. Wodehouse's wit is not simply about observation. When you translate works such as these something fundamental is always lost. Because, and this is Ostler's fundamental failing, languages are not interchangeable. Even in less literary works, such as films, dubbed or subtitled works are far from popular. This isn't to say that other language cultures don't produce works of value, but the cultural dominance of English has as much to do with the power of the language as the economic might of the English speaking nations.

Historians generally commit one of two errors: they either believe that history always repeats in the same way or that history is somehow over and times now are different. It is rarely given to someone to commit both in one work, but Ostler manages it with aplomb.

[Mark Bahnisch · Rating 2 out of 5]

I very much liked Nicholas Ostler's Ad Infinitum - one of the better histories of Latin. Publishers - I'm your market segment for these, I read all of them!

Both because of some postgraduate study I've been doing in Cross Cultural and Applied Linguistics and a powerful personal and professional interest in World Englishes and language acquisition, I was delighted to find this title in my local library.

Unfortunately, I found Ostler's argument that the world will no longer need a lingua franca a poor and unconvincing one. On the face of it, the reasons he identifies as the causes of the decline and fall of previous lingua francas are plausible, but his failure to see what is different in a world characterised by unprecedented depth of globalisation is disappointing. Or to acknowledge the potential of deglobalisation and not just shifts in language policy within nation states.

Of course, it's not Ostler's fault that he wrote before the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, but the consequence that his view of world geo-politics is quite Whiggish is unfortunate. I don't recall a reference to Fukuyama's End of History thesis, but Ostler writes as if the age of large scale war and weaponised ideological and trade disputes is over, something that appears absurd in 2019. So for a book aiming to predict the future, this is a problem. It's really a static picture, with a lot of cherry picked examples to sustain his thesis.

I also thought his secondary claim that artificial intelligence would obviate the need for a global lingua franca questionable. That's in part because Ostler seems to be thinking mainly of written communication. Face to face relationships are, of course, best sustained through verbal communication (which does not need to imply the necessity of a spoken lingua franca but does explain its utility). So there's the relatively trite point that 'Google Translate' and the like are rather useless in translating Asian languages into English but also a broader point about the narrowness of his conception of communication.

A whole host of issues about the philosophical and linguistic underpinnings of machine translation, which are super interesting, also needed to be explored to sustain this argument, and weren't.

The central section of the book is essentially a history of Persian, which was extremely fascinating, but poorly linked to the rest, and more disappointing for that reason because I'd liked to have learned more!

So one star is for the history of Persian and the other star is for posing the question of whether English's/Englishes' status as a global lingua franca will come to an end. It's a really important question for a host of reasons, so a pity that the answer given is both polemical and not well reasoned or evidenced.

[Diana Sandberg · Rating 1 out of 5]

I put my name down for this book at the library ages ago, relying on several glowing reviews, and the fact that the subject matter is of particular interest to me. In the meantime, I bought a copy of another of his books, Empires of the Word:A Language History of the World. And I’ve been struggling with it intermittently for months. This guy is a difficult read; can’t really put my finger on why, but my brain just wants to escape after 20 pages or so. There are some interesting facts, but hard to pick up on when the eyes glaze over. I had some unreasonable hope that this book would be better. But it isn’t. At least it helped me decide to just give up on the other one. Sigh.

[Benjamin Pearson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Agree with many others that I found the book quite dry and was a real struggle to get through it. He seemed to rehash many ideas over and over again (book could of been half as long in my opinion) especially in the last chapter which I was sure was almost paragraph for paragraph in some sections.

Its strange, that being a history lover as I am that I could not get into this read. I also found his conclusion that "technology" will ultimately be its death of global English to be a little bit underwhelming as I expected that he would of built up a coherent argument rather then just provide a history of languages.

[David R. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Linguistics expert Ostler advances the contention that in an ever-tech crazy world that the traditional "lingua franca" (i.e. a language that serves higher level functions across many nations) is doomed to extinction and that International English is the next victim. His reasoning is based on the death of past L.F.s including Latin and various Asian tongues. It's a mighty reach and the book is not entirely convincing. This is a treat for linguists. Not so much for the layman.

[Melchior Philips (Melchior on TheStoryGraph) · Rating 1 out of 5]

As an academic in English language, I must warn you: This book fails to engage with any of the research done on English as a Lingua Franca, making all predictions for the future of it flimsy and ungrounded.
This is a book about the history of lingua francas, not about English as a lingua franca. This is a book for historians, not linguists. Be warned.

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

The history in it is great, and I'm a big fan of Ostler's writing, but even as an MT technofuturist I find him overly optimistic in his time-frame for when (presumably non-interlingua) computer translation will make the concept of a lingua franca unimportant.

[Maximo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating overview of historical lingua francas and the causes of their decline. There's a lot to be learned in the ancient world, and there are some very valid comparisons to today's lingua franca.

However I'm not convinved of the thesis that English will no longer be spoken without Anglo-Saxon preeminence. It really seems like English has grown legs of its own internationally, with or without the US/UK, as currently seen in the EU at least. French or German could not substitute English anytime soon because they simply don't have the appeal, and the respective mainlands are not at global power status.

As regards technological progress in hindering language learning, there could be some truth to that, but we're still far from automating live interpreting, and the main goal of learning English is to eventually speak it at work or abroad, while reading translated texts from English is not as important. Not counting work and business scenarios, there's countless international and Eramus-type programs that run entirely on English, there's wealthy digital nomands bumming around the world using primarily English, expats will also tend to speak English with other expats even if it's not their native language, meetups and yoga/pilates classes in English, etc. I can't really see that being replaced with technology anytime soon.

[Misha Coffey-Burns · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great observations on the history of “the lingua franca”, with really fascinating asides on creoles/pidgins/trade languages. The material analysis is, naturally, outdated, but the conclusions Ostler draws will likely hold up (i.e. English will plummet in the number of “mother tongue” speakers, eventually losing its status as the lingua franca of modernity only to recede to limited use in the Anglophone countries, while technology permits the use of all languages in tandem with machine translations.)

Read “Empires of the Word” instead, tbh. Still a good time.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

As always, a masterful and deeply interesting setting out of historic language relations from this outstanding author. However, he does seem a little too optimistic about the possibilities of machine translation (to my mind) and his conclusions based on this are the least extensively argued part of an otherwise excellent book.

[Carmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have you ever wondered how two groups of people choose what language they will communicate in? The reasons are many. I hadn't connected Latin being so popular for so n long even though I knew the significance of the printing press and am Catholic! I never put it together. Very interesting and well written.

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Even though I've an interest in the topic, I found it very hard to connect with this book. I don't know why, but it just wasn't interesting.

[Egor G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting ideas though it would have been nice to see more of an exploration of new lingual technologies.

[Audrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was fascinating and really enjoyed it. But it is drier than the Sahara and unless you are really into languages, I wouldn’t recommend it to you.

[Solvej · Rating 1 out of 5]

Totally tedious reading

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh man, this book was a slog.

I wanted to like it. I was very excited initially: at last a book about English's future as a world-wide 'lingua franca'. Will it continue to grow and flourish? Will it be replaced by some other language? Or will new technologies render the very need for a lingua franca obsolete? These are all questions the author promises to tackle.

And tackle them he does. Eventually. But in between the opening and closing sections, most relevant to his thesis, he has sandwiched a tediously detailed recounting of the rise and fall of almost every 'lingua franca' in recorded history.

I like history, but I am clearly a rote amateur next to Ostler. He seems to know the history of ancient central Asia like the back of his hand and assumes that the reader will too. Some of it was interesting simply because it was new (I knew very little about the Sogdians and their important role in trade before the rise of Islam) but a great deal of it was very dry. And Ostler seems to assume that the reader is almost as familiar with the subject matter as he is, which means you are also frequently lost.

All these detours are ostensibly in the name of compiling evidence about lingua francas, but the material could have been much more briefly summarized to make the same basic points. It's clear that Ostler is simply fascinated by the interactions of ancient Turkic and Persian.

More power to him, but as a writer he is rather dry and he frequently lost this poor reader along the way, so his enthusiasm is not necessarily effectively communicated. What should be a book that is accessible to layman feels a lot more like a thesis paper written for academic peers. A very specialized group of academic peers at that.

And in the end, I didn't find his conclusions that compelling. Ostler suggests that the rise of nationalism will eventually relegate English from its lingua franca status to a mother tongue spoken mostly by native speakers. This will be largely due to the fact that Machine Translation, along the lines of Google Translate, will make the need to write in English to be heard by a global audience irrelevant.

Ostler may be well-grounded in linguistics and history, but his grip on technology is not as impressive. While machine translation has come a long way, it has definitely plateaued and there are numerous very complex problems still to be solved. Personally, I find the evidence that we are a century away from the digital version of Douglas Adams' "babelfish" to be pretty thin. Ostler acknowledges some of the problems, but then simply dismisses them.

He also glosses over the so-called 'founder effect'. The fact that virtually all the software and technology that global communications relies on was originated in English-speaking countries and written in English strikes me as a fairly strong argument for the continued importance of English. Ostler seems to think that as soon as non-English-speaking countries start developing their own software English's 'first mover' advantage will vanish, but as a programmer I don't think that's true.

For any country to do this they will have to duplicate decades of software development, all coded and documented in English. Familiarity with English will be a required skill for programmers for decades to come, at minimum. Unless Machine Translation really does advance by leaps and bounds in the near future, it's hard to imagine that the language of the vast corpus of American-developed software will suddenly become obsolete. Or that the ultimate information database, the World Wide Web, until recently almost exclusively the domain of English, will be rendered irrelevant.

It's unfortunate that this book was so long and slow and disappointing. I think Ostler really had two books here, one the dense and thorough exploration of Central Asian lingua francas, the other bold prognostications about English. One is of interest only to specialists, the other makes some interesting but not completely compelling arguments. If they had been separated out I think he could have found an audience for each. As it is, this book is simultaneously too demanding for the layman and not convincing enough in its arguments.

[Rossdavidh · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel", by Nicholas Ostler, is a book whose basic thesis is in the title and subtitle.

This is the first book I know of where he has to get straight with the reader what plural is going to be used for "lingua franca". After considering "lingue franche" and "linguae francae", he settles on "lingua-francas". It's a convention that is unlikely to catch on, if only because I doubt many other people will be discussing lingua-francas by the batch often enough to learn it. It's just the sort of geeky consideration that lets me know I am probably going to enjoy a book.

After a bit of such introductory groundwork, Ostler takes us on a world-spanning tour of the history of speaking a language not because it's the one you know best, not because it's the one you like best, but because it's the one everyone else knows too (even if it's not the one they know best either). Latin, Greek, Persian, Arabic, Phoenician, Sogdian, Swahili, Mandarin Chinese, and on and on. It's not like I can claim to have remembered it all, but it was great fun to hear about. Ostler is good about filling in some historical detail to make the linguistics go down easier.

Where Ostler is going with this, is a general theory of how lingua-francas come to exist, what sustains them, and how and why they decay. It's an ambitious topic, all the more admirable because he's basically using a good understanding of lingua-francas to establish that we won't have any more after English. Looking at the forces that cause a lingua franca to rise (or fall), he sees no plausible successor language for the next few decades. What happens after that is the more speculative part of the book.

Automated translation is a field, like artificial intelligence, which has often overpromised and underdelivered. However, perhaps like artificial intelligence, it has begun to improve in the actual results in the last ten years. Ostler's thesis is that as it improves, even if only in its ability to help a person with imperfect understanding of a language to get by, it will weaken the motivation for ANY lingua franca. Ultimately, if Google Translate and two years of English class in High School is enough to let you read English, will it really be worth it to spend the years required to learn to speak it fluently? Currently, in nations all over the world, the answer is still, "yes". It may remain "yes" for a while yet. But, if Ostler is correct, it will not remain "yes" forever, and when it changes, it will not be because Mandarin Chinese or Spanish or some other language displaces it, but rather because lingua-francas will go the way of record labels and newspapers, victims of obsolescence when technology provides another way.

[E · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book with a terrible title. This book isn't really about English, but it IS about lingua francas. A lingua franca is a nonnative language used to communicate with others who do not speak the same native language as you. English is clearly the dominant lingua franca on the planet today. However, this book is a history of lingua francas. So you get Sanskrit, Persian, and Latin primarily, plus a few others here and there. Ostler studies why these languages became lingua francas and why they stopped being lingua francas.

Persian is probably the language most discussed in the book. And yes, he calls it Persian. There's nothing wrong with referring to the language today spoken in Iran as "Persian" instead of "Farsi" (and if you want more information on where that name came from, read the book). Anyhow, Persian is interesting because it wasn't even the lingua franca of its own empire (that would be Aramaic). However, the language managed to stitch together vast stretches of the Eurasian landmass for a thousand years.

What about the ostensible subject of the book, English? Obviously, British and American might of the past 350 years has led to native English speakers being found worldwide, and its role as a lingua franca is bolstered by these widespread English speakers, as well as American media and military strength. This widespread nature means it probably won't break up into a family of languages (as Latin did into the Romances while still maintaining itself as proper Latin). However, technology will probably spell an end to the need for any language to serve as lingua franca (think instant translation, e.g.). So enjoy English hegemony while it lasts, and stop wasting that money on Chinese lessons, Mark Zuckerberg.

[Ushan · Rating 3 out of 5]

English is a global lingua franca (a language used for communication by people for none of whom it is native). There have been many other linguae francae in the past, but they have stopped being such, and went back to being used only by the native speakers. In the late 19th and early 20th century, German was the international language of science; it ceased to be that when Hitler fired all the non-Aryan German professors, many of whom went to Great Britain and the United States, and started publishing their new research in English. Persian used to be the common literary language of Central Asia and northern South Asia until the 19th-century British and Russian conquests dethroned it. After the Muslim conquests of India hundreds of years earlier, it had in turn dethroned Sanskrit as a common literary language of North India. Although the conquerors of India were Turkic, they regarded Persian as a more refined language than their own, like the Romans regarded Greek. Curiously, in the Achaemenid Empire, it was Old Persian that was considered insufficiently refined, and Aramaic was used as the common language of the empire's many provinces. Sogdian was the trade language along the Silk Road until the expansion of Islam disrupted the trade. Latin was the common literary language of Roman Catholic Europe for over a thousand years, until the invention of the printing press gradually made it irrelevant. No other language is now in the position to dethrone English, yet Ostler thinks that computer translation software will do it, allowing speakers of different languages to communicate without learning each other's language or a lingua franca.

[John Pyrce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remarkable overview of lingua francas, languages used across cultures for trade, religion, or government. Examples are Latin, Persian, Sogdian (!), and of course English. Christianity began in Aramaic (which Christ spoke), was written in Greek (the prestige lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean), converted to Latin (because of Rome), and finally vernacular languages. Vernacular languages are the most permanent. Lingua francas can disappear rapidly when the motivation behind them changes; see Latin. English will cease to be a lingua franca as the role of the English speaking countries diminishes and machine translation becomes more competent. (I'm not convinced about this, but I'm frequently wrong about things like this.) Other major languages aren't candidates to replace English, however, because they are local and there is no obvious mechanism to cause them to be adopted by others. English hasn't been adopted as the vernacular of many countries, but only the second language, making it possible to lose importance.

[George Corley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A long, sprawling account of lingua francas around the world, used as case studies in an attempt to discern the future of English, the most successful such language in human history. The final argument -- that when English ends its run as global lingua franca, everyone will communicate in their own languages with technological translation aids -- seems somewhat utopian, but I can't really find a fatal flaw when you take the long view on this. Of course, regardless of what you feel about that argument, the real value of this book is the wealth of information about the linguistic history of the world, from Persian to Sogdian to German to Nahuatl and Quechua.

Be warned, this is a long and dense read. It WILL most certainly take a good chunk of time to read and process, but I think it's well worth it.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a pathetic, drooling monoglot, I sink down in awe before someone who can talk intelligently about the rise of Sogdian, the decline of Persian, and the relationship between Tuscan and Umbrian. Some of it is pretty dense, and pretty obscurely related to the thesis, which is that the deathless tongue of Shakespeare probably has at best a century to go as a major global language and two or three more as a known language at all. But there's lots of good stuff in here: the comparison between Swahili (a huge language, but with almost no native speakers) and Mandarin (the hugest, but with almost no non-native speakers)was fascinating.

[Angela Randall]

I heard of this book in an article from the National Review, which also added a good reason not to buy the book: "Who cares if English “will gradually retreat to its native-speaking territories”? Gloating over the widespread use of English smacks of imperial triumphalism. Sure, it’s great if I need a cab in New Delhi and the cabbie speaks English, but if he didn’t what’s it to us?"

I don't know. Personally, I think it looks interesting.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the latest from Nicholas Ostler, after writing about Latin and its fate in his previous book "Ad Infinitum" he tackles the present and the future of English in the world. To anybody who wants to see what the future of English is going to be I recommend to "like" BBC World Have Your Say on Facebook and read the comments.