[by:¿É¿ÉÓ¢Óï¡«m.moreplr.com]
[00:00.00] English is the most successful language in the history of the world.
[00:07.23] It is spoken on every continent, is learnt as a second language by schoolchildren and is the vehicle of science,
[00:13.47] global business and popular culture.
[00:16.51] Many think it will spread without end.
[00:19.17] But some scholars of the rise and fall of languages make a surprising prediction that the days of English as the world's lingua franca may be numbered.
[00:28.13] Conquest, trade and religion were the three biggest forces behind the spread of early lingua franca.
[00:34.54] The Achaemenid emperors, conquerors of the Babylonians in 539 BC, spoke Persian as their native language, but pragmatically adopted Aramaic as the world's first" interlingua",
[00:46.38] i.e. International language.
[00:49.43] Official long distance communications were written in Aramaic, sent across the empire and then translated from Aramaic upon arrival.
[00:57.03] Persian itself would serve as a lingua franca not at the time of the empire's greatest heights but roughly from 1000 AD to 1800.
[01:06.21] The Turkic conquerors of Central Asia, Anatolia and the Middle East, though they adopted Islam and worshipped in Arabic,
[01:14.05] often kept Persian as the language of the court and of literature.
[01:17.51] Persian was also the court language of Turkic ruled India when the British East India Company arrived.