English.

(But the Scots dialect).

Italian.

Klingon.

That thing from Gulliver's Travels where the learned men of Laputa carried around a sack of objects to use as symbolic speech. If we're gonna have something as impossibly utopian as a lingua franca then let's go all in.

Not sure how it's utopian. English is almost universally spoken. Always a downer.

I thought you mean a proper world language, not just replacing English as a working language for most people.

And it's not a downer when you need to get to the streetcar at four in the morning while lost and about to be hungover in Prague...

It's always about alcohol, isn't it.

As for me, I'd choose Anglo-Saxon.

Yes. It is always about alcohol. Which I can order in 37 languages.

Thai. You gotta love a language with 34 words for "massage".

American

@dubm, how many languages can you read/write/speak?

Navajo

English. It's an extremely simple language by comparison. The conjugations of the verbs are very simple, there's only one definite article for every noun (all other languages I know have two to four). It's a very convenient coincidence that such a simple language became so important.

Not sure what lingua Franca is. Could someone translate please?

wikipedia.org Find: Lingua Franca =)

Well, if you look for an easy and immediate and understandable language, I suppose English could be one of the best choices. For the same reason, I'd drop PE's italian (too many exceptions to the rules to be learnt - well, it's obvious, being italian :D)

Then, if you consider that a complex language trains best our brains to analyse (or analyze, pick you favourite :P) the relationship between signifier and signified, and thus keeping our brain trained, maybe I'd drop English (the way they teach it outside England/USA, at least).

For the record, I am not stating that English speakers are less intelligent, because real English is complex (first) and because I can't quantify this effect.

Consider the case of that tribe which couldn't learn to count even with missionaries' assistance, because they had only "one", "two" and "many" as words to count, and thus couldn't undestand the difference between "six" and "nine" (and don't say "it's simple, reverse it").

Well, the simpler it is to learn a language, the less time you have to spend in a classroom learning it and the more time you can spend on vocabulary, literature etc., learning all sorts of nuances and use ever more precise words and expressions to say what you mean. I've been in France many times and the people there simply don't speak English well, making idiots out of themselves on the entire continent and outside.

^Which has precious little to do with the subject at hand, but whenever an opportunity arises to verbally clobber the French one should take it.

:D

It's not about using vocabulary or literature to learn everything, it's about unintentionally reasoning about the true and hidden links between words and meanings while you say (*or think*) them.

I discovered amusing connections I didn't ever consider between italian words just by studying Latin, thus reasoning between conceptual connections hidden in linguistic connections, even when I didn't mean to do it.
Comparing different languages is the same, leaving aside obvious differences.

English because I know it

@redhouse - you should post less about things you do not understand. A clever backhand against France (tongue in cheek, I hope) is fine, but stop commenting on linguistics until you find a clue somewhere. English is *NOT* simple for foreigners to learn. All of those verb conjugations and noun gender/case endings are "simple" if you grew up with them. Russian has 6 (or 7) cases, but only 5 verb tenses (English has a huge number ... try parsing "he will have been being beaten by then" and translate it into any other language). We also have 51 prepositions which are nearly impossible for foreigners to sort out (Finnish has zero, but then they have 20+ noun cases). English may be the new "lingua franca" but it is not because it is simple.

newspeak, duh

@VirtualBob, let's do past tense of "walk" together, shall we? Here it comes:

I walked
You walked
He/She walked
We walked
You (plural) walked
We... and here it comes..! walked

I can tell you as a foreigner, that's much easier to learn than the French variant, where every "walked" is different.

Also "he will have been being beaten by then"? Is that a phrase you use often? Isn't it "he will have been beaten by then" when you're referring to the expected outcome of a future conflict?

"English may be the new "lingua franca" but it is not because it is simple."
-I never claimed that it was the new lingua france *because* it was simple, I claimed that it was a *good* lingua franca, *because* it is simple. The reason English is such an important language nowadays has more to do with the former British Empire and the dominance of the US on the international stage than with their language being simple, anyone with primary school education knows that.

In the Netherlands, we have to learn three foreign languages; English, French and German (in that order of priority) and I can tell you English is a *lot* easier. It's impossible to learn not only every French noun, but to remember whether it is male/female is impossible. German is even more complicated, they have - IIRC - about 16 different articles where English has three (the / a / an) and their application is extremely simple (the "n" in "an" is added if the noun following it is a vowel, it is *that* simple).

Anyways, suffice it to say you're a real moron and I'm going. "You should post less about things you do not understand." Who the fuck do you think you are, my granddad?

Definitely Italian. A relatively easy language, very simple to pronounce, with a wonderful melody to it. Even though my favorite language is English, I must say it sounds like barking compared to Italian.

Lingala

Thank you Thucy. If it's good enough for Kinshasa, it's good enough for the world.

"I can tell you as a foreigner, that's much easier to learn than the French variant, where every "walked" is different."

Eh?

J'ai marche
Tu as marche
Il a marche
Nous avons marche
Ils ont marche

It's the same participle. French past tense is easy. Not as easy as English, I'll grant, but not difficult.

Putin, it's marché if you use it like that and I obviously wasn't talking about passé composé...