The Last Lingua Franca

Download or read book The Last Lingua Franca written by Nicholas Ostler and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-11-23 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the rise and fall of English as the most widely spoken language in human history and discusses what language will overtake its dominance as English-speaking nations are challenged by the rising wealth of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Download or read book The Last Lingua Franca written by Nicholas Ostler and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 English: 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.

Download or read book The Last Lingua Franca written by Nicholas Ostler and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of "Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin" presents an erudite and provocative examination of the rise and coming fall of English as the world's language. Illustrations. Maps.

Download or read book Emergent Lingua Francas and World Orders written by Phyllis Ghim-Lian Chew and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an alternative paradigm in understanding and appreciating World Englishes (WEs) in the wake of globalization and its accompanying shifting priorities in many dimensions of modern life, including the emergence of the English language as the dominant lingua franca (ELF). Chew argues that history is a theatre for the realization of lingua francas, offering a model that shows the present as derived from the past and as a bearer of future possibility, the understanding of which is rooted in the understanding of World Englishes and ELF. The book will engage with some of the current theoretical debates in WEs and includes, as a means of fleshing out the model, sociolinguistic case studies of Arabia, China Fujian, and Singapore.

Download or read book The Lingua Franca written by Natalie Operstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-02 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By de-anonymizing the key text on Mediterranean Lingua Franca, the book opens unexpected new areas for linguistic and historical research.

Download or read book English as a Lingua Franca written by Luke Prodromou and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2008-01-06 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a corpus of data drawn from naturally-occurring second language conversations, this book explores the role of idiomaticity in English as a native language, and its comparative role in English as a lingua franca. Through examining how idiomaticity enables first language learners to achieve a greater degree of fluency, the book explores why idiomatic language poses such a challenge for users of English as a lingua franca. The book puts forward a new definition of competence and fluency within the context of English as a lingua franca, concluding with an analysis of practical implications for the lingua franca classroom. This in-depth study of English language learning using corpus data will be of interest to researchers in applied linguistics and corpus linguistics and to teachers of English as an international lingua franca.

Download or read book English as a Lingua Franca: Attitude and Identity written by Jennifer Jenkins and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007-07-26 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on research conducted among teachers, this text examines the role of standard language ideology in ELF attitude formation, critiques current SLA theories and ELT practices, highlights links between ELF accent attitudes and ELF identities, and includes proposals for making ELT pedagogy and testing more relevant.