Super-Diversity and Democracy. A Few Thoughts On Philippe Van Parijs

This chapter compares Philippe Van Parijs's views on English as a lingua franca to his opponents'. Philippe Van Parijs advocates for English as a global language. This would improve democracy by fostering cross-language communication. Pascale Casanova, Anna Wierzbicka, and Yukio Tsuda disagree. Casanova (2015) acknowledges that English is unstoppable but warns that any adoption of a lingua franca, a mother tongue for part of the world's population, disadvantages all others. They'll be dominated. English as a lingua franca has many critics, but ideological issues dominate. Most critics view English as a psychological and political attack on sovereignty. Adopting English, a language different from one's mother-tongue in which one feels most comfortable expressing oneself, is seen as imposing conditions on one's thought, putting all non-anglophones at a disadvantage and anglophones at an advantage. The debate over whether there should be a "lingua franca" has two parts: should there be one, and should it be a universal language? Most of the world's population has ignored the debate over a lingua franca, with some lip-service to the "anti-colonial cause" but no real movement to use native languages.