[vlovich123]

What criteria are you using?

~320M French speakers globally (220M native, official language for 29 countries)

~559M Spanish speakers (~480M native, 20 countries)

~1.1B Mandarin speakers globally (a few countries, mother tongue in ~20 countries)

~1.5B English speakers globally (~400M native, official language for 67 countries)

So for much of the world it seems pretty clearly English (& has been since WWII) and French is in the “second” tier competing with Spanish and Mandarin (probably just behind Spanish & Mandarin in terms of penetration lingua franca is about being the bridge language).

[philwelch]

I’m not sure where you’re getting your numbers, but Wikipedia claims 360 million native Arabic speakers, which pushes France a little further down the list.

[Koshkin]

Yet, somehow I have no problem calling French 'franca'...

[lm28469]

You do realize that "franca" here has nothing to do with French or France ? Neither today nor originally

[vasco]

I did not know the origin at all so looked it up:

> Based mostly on Northern Italy's languages (mainly Venetian and Genoese) and secondarily on Occitano-Romance languages (Catalan and Occitan) in the western Mediterranean area at first, Lingua Franca later came to have more Spanish and Portuguese elements, especially on the Barbary Coast (now referred to as the Maghreb). Lingua Franca also borrowed from Berber, Turkish, French, Greek and Arabic.

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

[cassepipe]

Well, Lingua Franca == Frankish language and since France got its name from the Franks I wouldn't say it's got nothing to do

[qwytw]

> Well, Lingua Franca == Frankish

Technically no. Especially not the northern dialects which modern French is based on. Arabs/North Africans/etc. just called all Western European Franks. The actual dialect/pigeon language used in the Mediterranean and called "Lingua Franca" was mainly based on Northern Italian, Occitan and Catalan (so barely related to modern French).

[Koshkin]

That's not exactly true. To quote Wikipedia, Lingua franca meant literally "Frankish language" in Late Latin, and it originally referred specifically to the language that was used around the Eastern Mediterranean Sea as the main language of commerce.

[qwytw]

> to the language that was used around the Eastern Mediterranean Sea as the main language of commerce.

Which was a language that was barely related to modern French (besides belonging to the same Romance language sub-branch which includes Catalan, Occitan and most Northern Italian dialects, coincidentally places where most of those merchants who introduced that language came from).

[thaumasiotes]

> Which was a language that was barely related to modern French (besides belonging to the same Romance language sub-branch which includes Catalan, Occitan and most Northern Italian dialects

So, very closely related to French?

[hardlianotion]

To be fair to parent, France is on the western side of the Mediterranean sea.

[qwytw]

It wasn't even on the Mediterranean at the time (or rather French was spoken in the North of modern France back then). People on Mediterranean coast of France were speaking Occitan and other dialects which were more closely related to Catalan and Northern Italian (all of those were mostly eradicated during and during the century or so after the French revolution).

[rockinghigh]

The eradication of Occitan and other local languages like Breton was the strongest in mid 1800s to the early 1900s. Students speaking it would be punished.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha