English as Lingua Franca

[elfs]

Apparently, the "common speech" of Europe now has a name: ELF. English as Lingua Franca. Timothy Ash refers to it in his essay, The Banality of Good, in which he writes: "It is the banality of the good that has Vladimir and Maria making love not war, while comparing notes, in Elf, about the latest American movie."

Ash's essay is interesting because he makes a point: Europe is uniformly banal. It has no great evil to resist, and so there is no need for great good to rise. Only the banal, ordinary kind of goodness remains: don't cheat on your job, your neighbor, or your wife, be kind to your children, study hard.

The end of history will be a very sad time, partly because the things that once called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism will be replaced by economic calculation, and partly because in the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.
--Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and The Last Man

Bring it on.

Comments

[lovingboth]

Yep, I thought of you when I first heard it.

One description calls it English with all the 'mistakes' that people whose first language isn't English make. "I have been here since six years" etc etc.

[fallenpegasus]

Most of those mistakes are mistakes in following all the exceptions and irregular forms. If enough people make the same mistake enough times, it's no longer a mistake (since English grammer and vocabulary is descriptive instead of prescriptive).

Maybe between the spread of ELF, and the forces of "verbing weirds language", by the end of the next century, English will be more rational in form.

[ashley-y.livejournal.com]

Bring it on.

Oh yeah.

Btw, isn't "Lingua Franca" Latin for "the French Language"?

[wendor.livejournal.com]

Nope.

Etymology: Italian, literally, Frankish language

See any work on European History for more information on who the Franks were.

(such as http://www.ku.edu/kansas/medieval/108/lectures/franks_rise.html)

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I could explain this, but it's not my pigeon.