English is a working lingua franca, not a majority spoken tongue

Evidence

In one sense, a language foreign to 92 percent of the people in the world cannot be the world’s language. In another sense, however, it could be so described, if it is the language which people from different language groups and cultures use to communicate with each other, if it is the world’s lingua franca, or in linguistic terms, the world’s principal Language of Wider Communication (LWC). People who need to communicate with each other have to find means of doing so. At one level they can rely on specially trained professionals who have become fluent in two or more languages to serve as interpreters and translators. That, however, is awkward, time-consuming, and expensive. Hence throughout history lingua francas emerge, Latin in the Classical and medieval worlds, French for several centuries in the West, Swahili in many parts of Africa, and English throughout much of the world in the latter half of the twentieth century. Diplomats, businessmen, scientists, tourists and the services catering to them, airline pilots and air traffic controllers, need some means of efficient communication with each other, and now do it largely in English. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 162

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the two senses of ‘world language’ — lingua franca (English’s actual status) vs. majority spoken tongue (which it is not, at 8%) — a clean conceptual disambiguation.
• XREF: The 92% figure and lingua-franca framing connect to Milgrom’s work on how language/customs bridge emerging trading communities; also David Crystal’s ‘English as a Global Language’. — connects to: English is the mandatory working language of all global trading floors — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures: The Virtual…, 109