To view the poster full screen right click and open in a new tab
Communication is one of the biggest barriers faced by people around the world. With 7,391 languages spoken in the world, many believe a lingua franca would improve our lives vastly. English is already used as the language of communication in some industries but its ties to colonisation lead many to believe it is not suitable to become the global language. There have been past attempts at creating a new lingua franca, for example, Pasigraphy, which works alongside language. However, it has limited success due to its complexity. The internet is often believed to be English dominated but the presence of other languages has grown greatly in the last ten years. The cultural effect of a lingua franca would be devastating as it would cause many, if not all, other languages to die out. It still stands that there would be an economic benefit from a lingua franca but only if translation technology does not develop a foolproof method before the introduction of the lingua franca. Our report investigates these issues to assess the probability of a lingua franca becoming our future.
Project Group Two – Darius Brech, Tamsin Cowie, Annabelle MacLeod, Emily Lorimer and Lily Robertson
This is a really interesting topic, what drew you yo research Lingua Franca? How long do you think it would take to enforce a Lingua Franca if everyone was to agree to the idea?
What drew us towards researching the possibilities of a Lingua Franca was the idea of global communication, where people from any country can communicate with one another under a universal language. We collectively came to the conclusion, based on our research, that it will still take many years before a Lingua Franca is fully accepted as a global language, this can be due to cultural reasons, such as another language undermining less common languages, along with the amount of time it would take to create online content in a new language alongside each nations mother language and the time frame that it will take for everyone to learn a completely new universal language.
Thank you! We were drawn to researching it by a curiosity about the development of English from the start of its use till now. It is arguably a different language. The idea that language can develop and evolve to that extent made us wonder what the future is for our use of language. I believe it would take a long time to switch as many people are very patriotic and attached to their language. I would think it would take several generations for it to be a successful lingua franca, with everyone able to use it.