The Last Lingua Franca

Nick Ostler''s The Last Lingua Franca looks at the rise and fall of world languages, prompting the quesiton "in the twenty-first century, can we really take the dominance of English for granted?".

In their time, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit and Persian have each been world languages, sweeping the globe for centuries at a time. And yet they have all been displaced, just as Nicholas Ostler predicts English will be. What forces drive these linguistic currents? What characteristics do lingua francas share? And most importantly, how do they lose their power?

In this revelatory book, Ostler explores the rise of a linguistic diversity that we could never before have imagined.