Say like they picked French or Spanish to use instead
Because American Media has a lot of influence so I wonder what if English wasn’t chosen. Would there be people that would see French/Spanish as a desirable language to learn?
British colonialism shaped the wide use of English throughout the world a lot more than anything to do with the US.
In the sense that the US is a product of British colonialism then yes. Global communication wasn’t anywhere near robust until the empire was in decline.
If only the government “decided”. no one will care and Americans will continue using English as usual.
If all Americans decided to speak Spanish. World would still continue to speak in English because currently all information in all fields are mostly in English.
If all Americans decided to speak Spanish and translated everything into Spanish then probably world will start speaking Spanish.
A real life example is when Romans conquered all Greek territories, all those nations continued for decades writing in Greek.
I know for a fact that in Egypt all taxes and government related stuff remained in Greek even decades after Arab conquest.
I think the USA had enough German influence that it could have been a major second language if things where different politically at that critical time.
Mandarin
Problem is that it:
- lacks the amount of colonization as British empire had
- Mandarin-media is so boring. They’d never get widespread like Hollywood stuff. I used to watch them as a kid, but then I just realized they’re repeating the same cliches too often… It’s basically just half anti-japan stuff and half set in imperial China, never anything exciting.
Science and business are the biggest contribution to language adoption
Nothing much. Bad timing. USA is losing its position as an engineering/scientific center. Hollywood is unimportant in the sense of language spread. English is the current lingua franca, not American language.
