Review of Nicholas Ostler’s book The Last Lingua Franca
The glorious future of machine translation has an avid supporter - Nicholas Ostler, historian of world languages, President of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, and author of The Last Lingua Franca.
Following his fascinating and erudite review of the rise and fall of such world languages as Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Greek and Latin, Ostler’s new book leaves very little hope that English will maintain its dominant position in the modern world for much longer. Not because of strong competition from another language, but because of the growing linguistic diversity of the internet.
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