English as a Lingua Franca
English as a lingua franca I am going to tell you something about English as a lingua franca. I will be talking about 3 different subjects concerning English as a lingua franca and a lingua franca in common. First of all I will tell you something about the purpose of a lingua franca, or in other words; What is a lingua franca. Secondly I will give some reasons why a lingua franca should be or might be introduced. Then last but not least I will mention some of the problem which might occur when you’re trying to introduce a lingua franca. What is a lingua franca? A lingua franca is a language which would be used as a second language by all people. Maybe some of you have ever heard about Esperanto. It was created in 1859 by dr. Ludwik Zamenhof. Dr. Zamenhof was born in the former Russian part of Poland. His official profession was doctor. The city where he was born, Bialystok, it was common that the people where speaking Russian, Polish, Latvian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian and German. At the end of the 19th century Dr. Zamenhof wrote a book for which he was using the pseudonym “Dr. Esperanto”. This name was based on his hope for a new language. This language supposed to become a language which would be used and learned by everyone, so everybody would be able to understand each other and therefore the people might appreciate each other a bit more than when they are not able to understand each other. Dr. Zamenhof died in Warsaw in 1917. He never saw his ideal to have one common language become reality just partly. Since this time people became more and more interested in one common language, but so far nobody succeeded. English is one of the most mentioned languages when people are talking about a lingua franca, that’s one of the reasons why I chose English as a lingua franca as the subject of my presentation. Now I will tell you something about the reasons why we should have English as a lingua franca. First of all English is already used a lot all over the world.