LIN203H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Anglophile, Abracadabra, Extreme Ways
Document Summary
This class is about english words where they come from, how they"re constructed, how their meanings change over time, and more. It"s the most widely spoken language in the world today, in terms of total number of people who speak it, natively or non-natively. It functions as an international language, and as a common language for communication between people of different language backgrounds. (a language that has this function is called a lingua franca. ) The main reasons for the status of english are political and historical it was the language of the british empire and then the united states, the leading economic and cultural powers of the past 300 years or so. English-speaking countries exerted the strongest influence on the world, and that gave people all over the world incentive to learn english. If a different country had been the world"s leading power at the right time, its language might have become the international lingua franca.
