Language: Difference between revisions

[https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/27/english-language-global-dominance Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet]

  <mark>At present...[Spanish] is the second most used language in international trade, and the third most used in politics, diplomacy and culture after English and French.</mark>

  By the 18th century, classical French usurped Latin in international treaties, starting with the Treaty of Rasstatt (1714), which marked the end of the War of Succession in Spain. This was the beginning of French as a langue diplomatique....

  French might have been spoken in the courts of Europe all the way to Russia — it is the language of the nobility, including Catherine II, who used it in correspondence and daily communication — but <mark>English was the language of money, and money talks louder than philosophy</mark>. The Victorian City of London was the financial center of the world and most of its business was directed outwards and overseas, not domestically.

  The written Classical Chinese language is still read widely but pronounced differently by readers in China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan; for centuries it was a ''de facto'' universal ''literary'' language for a broad-based culture. In something of the same way Sanskrit in India and Nepal, and Pali in Sri Lanka and in Theravada countries of South-East Asia (Burma, Thailand, Cambodia) and Old Tamil in South India and Sri Lanka, were literary languages for many for whom they were not their mother tongue.

  Comparably, the Latin language (''qua'' Medieval Latin) was in effect a universal language of literati in the Middle Ages, and the language of the Vulgate Bible in the area of Catholicism, which covered most of Western Europe and parts of Northern and Central Europe also....