> not so far from the Minitel days, French was the lingua franca of diplomacy, and spoken all over the world.
What a ridiculous claim. The language spoken for Diplomacy is spoken by diplomats and has virtually nothing to do with what the population speaks. Just like Latin was the language of Religion and Science in Middle-Ages, but certainly not spoken by everyone else.
A classic problem with english translations of War and Peace is what to do about the languages? The main characters start out the novel speaking french with each other and russian with the servants (similar to the role of english for elite households in 2020 india?).
The costume drama https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2-fkZ-0Blw claims that in the seventeenth century, the aristocracy would've been familiar with enough with their tenants' dances (indeed, preferring them to french court customs) to perform them themselves, but no matter what the historical accuracy of that portrayal, Tolstoy's take on the nineteenth century situation was different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Peace#Language .
Not ridiculous. In the late 70's, everyone's second language in Spain (except OFC the ones speaking Iberian latin dialects or Basque having Spanish itself as a second one) for example wasn't English, but French.
If you wanted a better future (lots of people headed to France to work), you would learn French to make a good chunk of money and cheap goods, period.
> In the late 70's, everyone's second language in Spain (except OFC the ones speaking Iberian latin dialects or Basque having Spanish itself as a second one) for example wasn't English, but French.
1- Spain is a neighbor to France, so it's hardly surprising that French is used a lot in the first place.
2- Spain represents less than 1% of the World population, so it's hardly a proof that French was used all over the world in the 70s.
French is used across the world _today_, so it's not that much of a stretch to imagine that it was also used across the world in the 1970s.
By the Wikipedia numbers [1], French is the fifth most spoken language in the world by total number of speakers, yet only fifteenth by native speakers.
What a ridiculous claim. The language spoken for Diplomacy is spoken by diplomats and has virtually nothing to do with what the population speaks. Just like Latin was the language of Religion and Science in Middle-Ages, but certainly not spoken by everyone else.