1. Lingua Francas

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Latin was the lingua franca of its time, although it was only ever a minority language within the Roman Empire as a whole. Crucially, though, it was the language of the powerful leaders and administrators and of the Roman military - and, later, of the ecclesiastical power of the Roman Catholic Church - and this is what drove its rise to global language status.

With the growth of the Spanish Empire, Spanish became established in the Americas, as well as in parts of Africa, Asia and Oceania. It became the language of global trade until the Napoleonic Wars and the breakup of the Spanish Empire at the beginning of the 19th century. Spanish was used as lingua franca throughout the former Spanish Colonial Empire, including territory in present day U.S., but particularly in present-day Mexico, Spanish Caribbean, Central America and South America, and it's still a lingua franca within Hispanic America.

French was already a dominant language amongst the higher ranks of society in large parts of Europe even before the 17th century. For instance in England, French was spoken amongst the aristocracy since the 11th century and the Norman conquest. French was also important in intellectual circles from the medieval period onwards. The use of French became even more prominent in the 18th and 19th century when France became a leading nation from a political, intellectual and economical point of view. French was the language of diplomacy from the 17th century until the mid-20th century.

Until the early 20th century, Classical Chinese served as both the written lingua franca and the diplomatic language in Far East Asia. In the early 20th century, vernacular written Chinese replaced Classical Chinese within China as both the written and spoken lingua franca for speakers of different Chinese dialects, and because of the falling power and cultural influence of China in East Asia, English has since replaced Classical Chinese as the lingua franca in East Asia.

Swahili is used throughout large parts of East Africa and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo as a lingua franca, despite being the mother tongue of a relatively small ethnic group on the East African coast and nearby islands in the Indian Ocean. At least as early as the late 18th century, Swahili was used along trading and slave routes that extended west across Lake Tanganyika and into the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo. Swahili rose in prominence throughout the colonial era, and has become the predominant African language of Tanzania and Kenya. Some ethnic groups now speak Swahili more often than their mother tongues, and many, especially in urban areas, choose to raise their children with Swahili as their first language, leading to the possibility that several smaller East African languages will fade away as Swahili transitions from being a regional lingua franca to a regional first language.

Adapted from:  List of Lingua Francas. (n.d.). Retrieved January 12, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lingua_francas and The History of English - English as a Global Language. (n.d.). Retrieved June 25, 2021, from https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/issues_global.html  

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