Language
HEGE Series
List of languages by total number of speakers | Wikipedia
List of languages by number of native speakers | Wikipedia
To the great shame of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the traditional languages of Orthodox Christian liturgical worship (Koine Greek, Church Slavonic, Bulgarian, Romanian, Serbian, Georgian) rank nowhere near the top of these lists. Yet, those languages of the Orthodox Church from lands where Orthodox Christians have expatriated to the west are often the languages of the Orthodox Church in extraterritorial lands outside traditional patriarchal jurisdictions instead of exclusively the native languages of those lands. No wonder then that Orthodox Christians comprise such a tiny percentage of the population in those lands to which they have expatriated, and have proceeded to shirk any missionary responsibility there, preferring instead to insularly serve themselves instead of others in spiritual need.
Historic Language Prominence
| Language | Geographic Area | Time Period |
|---|---|---|
| Koine Greek | Hellenistic Period Byzantine Empire |
23 BC - 33 BC 286 AD - 1453 AD |
| Latin | Roman Empire Roman Catholicism | 27 BC - 476 AD into 1700s |
| Italian | Western Europe - Rennaissance | 1300 - 1700 AD |
| Spanish | Spanish Colonial Empire | 1500 AD - 1800 AD |
| French | French Colonial Empire | 1600 AD - 1800 AD |
| English | British Colonial Empire American Western Globalism | 1800 AD - 1945 AD 1945 AD - present |
List of Empires | Wikipedia
Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
And becoming a lingua franca of sorts, or universal language of American western globalism, just as Koine Greek was the universal language of the Hellenic Period and Byzantine Empire. English, along with French, Spanish and Madarin Chinese represent enormous evangelistic opportunity for the spread of Orthodoxy to those with "eyes to see and ears to hear".
Lingua Franca | Wikipedia
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.
How And Why Did English Supplant French As The World’s Lingua Franca?
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 English was the language of money, and money talks louder than philosophy. The Victorian City of London was the financial center of the world and most of its business was directed outwards and overseas, not domestically.
Universal language | Wikipedia
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....
In a more practical fashion, trade languages, such as ancient Koine Greek, may be seen as a kind of real universal language, that was used for commerce.
In historical linguistics, monogenesis refers to the idea that all spoken human languages are descended from a single ancestral language spoken many thousands of years ago.
It could be said plausibly that mathematics is the universal language of the world that all are capable of understanding.
During the Renaissance, standard Italian was spoken as a language of culture in the main royal courts of Europe, and among intellectuals.