“Dear Francophone and spanish guy: you appear to both be semi-literate, intolerant pillocks. If you have nothing constructive to add to this debate, please keep your ill informed and prejudiced opinions to yourselves, as the rest of us really do not have the time or the inclination to put up with them. Secondly, whilst French is certainly in decline, it is still indeed the preeminant language of food and culture, and has hundreds of millions of speakers. Spanish likewise is about the 4th most popular language in the world, so it is safe to say there is a fairly vibrant future for the both of them.”

Correction: The growth of French from 1950’s to the 1980’s maybe so slow let say by just 1% compared to English and Spanish but in the 1980’s it made a great stride in Africa.

French is the only global language along with English. True that more people speak English as a foreign language but French has more secondary speakers than English and almost all of them are in Africa and thanks to educational system which Anglophone Africa does not posses.

Just because it has fewer native speaker it doesn’t mean that it has declined.

I spend quite a bit of time in those countries and this simply isn’t true. Tz is the only country in that group that has Kiswahili as official language and that too is changing.

And Rwanda is moving away from French, the govt has already changed instruction in schools from French to English. Anyway they needed to do this to join the East African Community. It’s for the same reason that countries like ghana are teaching French in schools -their trading partners in Ecowas are mostly francophone. So it’s done for economic reasons. But whereas ghana is about teaching french as a foreign language, in Rwanda they are actually making english the medium of instruction in schools so there is a big difference there.

And do you mention about the status of French in Africa because Francophone Africa declared that French is their language too not just for French, Canadians, Belgians, or Swiss.

Why don’t you look at the status of English in Afican countries like Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi, and Zambia where it is being shaken by the promotion of Swahili in every aspects of the lives of people there.

But fop practical reasons, we only need 1 world language. I don’t see the point in having 2. And the verdict has already been reached decades ago: English is the world language.

I see no longer any point in having French and German as official languages of the EU institutions. This is not fair to the Italians, Polish, Spanish,… The French will have to start using English, like everybody else. Workers at the institutions would have a far better use of their time (and the EU would have a far bigger talent pool to fish from) if we would no longer require knowledge of French/German! This is called progress.

I believe that, your greediness and your stupid Spanish arrogance are the cause why spanish is on its way to its extinction like its mother, Latin. Nobody wants to learn spanish.

This thread is not made by a briton but by a hispanic guy who works for Instituto Cervantes desperate to attract people to study Spanish but futile because Spanish is not practical because of its very little contribution to human kind.