A lingua franca succeeds by being detached from any single ethnic or ideological identity

Evidence

As the leading linguistic scholar Joshua Fishman has observed, a language is more likely to be accepted as a lingua franca or LWC if it is not identified with a particular ethnic group, religion, or ideology. In the past English had many of these identifications. More recently English has been “de-ethnicized (or minimally ethnicized)”as happened in the past with Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. “It is part of the relative good fortune of English as an additional language that neither its British nor its American fountainheads have been widely or deeply viewed in an ethnic or ideological context for the past quarter century or so” [Italics his]. The use of English for intercultural communication thus helps to maintain and, indeed, reinforces peoples’ separate cultural identities. Precisely because people want to preserve their own culture they use English to communicate with peoples of other cultures. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 166

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the mechanism of ‘de-ethnicization’ that makes a contact language acceptable across cultural boundaries.
• QUESTION: Is de-ethnicization a general precondition for any global lingua franca, or a contingency? Chinese’s global spread would be a live test case.
• XREF: connects to: Language pride dissolves because it is too entangled with discredited nationalism — Cornel Verwey and Michael Quayle, Whiteness, racism, and Afrikaner…, 95; Creole language variation prevents identity from reifying into essence — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 349; Pidgin languages embody Relation negatively by belonging to no single tradition — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 477 (+1 more)