Lingua franca isn’t about native speakers, and if anything it’s about second language speakers. Mandarin has the most global native speakers, but even if we remove it from the running because it has a logographic writing system, number 2 is Spanish. Yet the global lingua franca is English.
mabeledo@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Lingua Franca is about how many people you could communicate with across boundaries, thus native speakers play a critical role here.
“English is the global lingua Franca” is frankly debatable, given the proficiency requirements in many fields. Proof of it is that translators are still ubiquitous in places of business when it comes to negotiations.