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Why is there no global language that at least nearly half the world speaks (3.5 billion, I'm talkin', including non-native speakers) (lemmy.ml)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by Hextubewontallowme@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Is the Tower of Babel still affecting us or something?

Edit:

We have 8 billion people, yet the best we could muster for the most total speakers of a language is under 2 billion, including non-natives...

English (1,452 million speakers) First language: 372.9 million Total speakers: 1.4+ billion According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-native speakers.

https://www.berlitz.com/blog/most-spoken-languages-world#:~:text=1.,English%20(1%2C452%20million%20speakers)&text=According%20to%20Ethnologue%2C%20English%20is,native%20and%20non%2Dnative%20speakers.

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[–] moon@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

English is the current lingua francia because the dominant nation has been speaking English for the past two hundred years and created a pop culture market

Cute that you think it's the U.S. and it's little movies that are responsible for English being widely spoken, and not the bloody history of British imperialism being forced on half the planet

[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I mentioned the bloody imperialism in the first half of the sentence.