English Lingua Franca Quotes & Sayings

I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages. — William Golding

English is the largest of human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language
this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and most flexible
despite its barbaric accretions ... or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it. — Robert A. Heinlein

Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used. — Russell Baker