Ten to fifteen years ago, 80% of content roaming on the internet was English. This fete of having English as the Lingua Franca in a world dominated by numerous languages was widely contributed by globalization and old colonization. Contrary to the situation of English dominance on the internet, new languages like Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian have emerged with the Chinese language occupying the second language on the internet (Vettorel & Franceschi, 2016). The emergence of these languages threatens the role of English on the internet, especially social media. Spoken by the most significant percentage of the world’s population, English enables people to share ideas through social media platforms. This paper discusses the implications of having English as the lingua franca, even with new languages emerging.
English language’s role in enabling people from different geographical locations to share ideas and opinions will lead to the emergence of new terminologies acceptable in English dictionaries (Vettorel & Franceschi, 2016). First, the use of numerous languages on the internet with English as the reference language implies that new terminologies will emerge, and these terminologies will combine English with these subsidiary languages. This role of bringing together different people will lead to loss of some words as some words will have more weight as compared to the existing English words (Vettorel & Franceschi, 2016). The tendency to have exposure to languages from the same family will be the main reason for the emergence of English related words.
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The Internet involves advertisements, and usually, these advertisements are made in different languages according to geographical locations. On this note, most advertising companies prefer local languages to achieve a competitive advantage over English using competitors (Vettorel & Franceschi, 2016). This trend implies that English’s role as a lingua franca is on the decrease, and within a few years, some languages will be on the same level as English. Attaining this situation will never change the status of English as the world’s lingua franca, as these other languages are numerous, but English brags of extensive coverage in most geographical areas.
References
Vettorel, P., & Franceschi, V. (2016). English as a lingua franca. Plurilingual repertoires and language choices in computer-mediated communication. Intercultural communication. New perspectives from ELF .
