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by avar 3643 days ago
French is currently unique in that it's the previous lingua franca, so much so that the term for "world language" in English is a French term.

That French is now using loan words from English doesn't mean that it's dying. Have you tried to speak English without French / Latin / Norse loan words? Good luck.

It just means that French is like any other language now, aggressively borrowing from the current world language. Nothing wrong with that.

1 comments

not quite. The term "lingua Franca" originally referred to a Mediterranean trading language - certainly a Romance language but not French. Yes for a while French was a lingua Franca in the modern sense but the term doesn't come from French.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca