French is Not the “Lingua Franca”. English Is!
The French had their opportunity for greatness, but blew it. Instead of building on the original language of business, the ancient Lingua Franca, they destroyed it so that their beloved French would, they hoped, conquer all tongues and the world become one great Francophony.
Lingua Franca came into being during the middle ages as a trade language used by traders, crusaders and various communities around the Mediterranean to negotiate and communicate with each other while conducting business. Sometime in the nineteenth century the language completely disappeared with nary a trace, at the exact same time that the French language ascended as the preferred tongue of the erudite. Speakers of French sneered at Lingua Franca for being too easy - a language of simpletons, much as they treat the English language of today. Until the French stealthily massacred Lingua Franca, it served as a highly efficient means of communication, a kind of pidgin language with a limited vocabulary and simple grammar. It lacked endless verb tenses and inflected case endings, which left the French speakers in a highly distressed state of anxiety when they were forced to listen its spoken words. It never evolved into a written language, mainly so as not to enflame French sensibilities even more. Nevertheless, Lingua Franca was just too easy to learn and to understand, so it had to be destroyed to make way for the much more evolved, yet barely comprehensible French language.
Now that English has become the Lingua Franca of the world’s business community, the French, under the glorious leadership of Jacques Chirac, have once again engaged themselves in the Battle of the Linguas. Although they are doomed to lose, they fight on, for as the world knows well, the French never give up the fight when it is civilized and bloodless.
Chirac vows to fight growing use of English:
Jacques Chirac pledged yesterday to fight the spread of the English language across the world as he defended his decision to walk out of an EU summit after a French business leader abandoned his mother tongue.“We fight for our language,” President Chirac said of the French walkout on Thursday when Ernest-Antoine Seillière, the French head of the European employers’ group Unice, addressed the summit in “the language of business”.
Mr Chirac added: “I was profoundly shocked to see a Frenchman express himself in English at the table.”
Francophones forever - fight on, fight on for the “égalité, complémentarité, and solidarité”. Man the barricades for La Francophony and all the glory be to the great leader, Jacques Chirac.
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