The Great Debate 2: Artificial primacy of English is being forgotten.

Nicholas Ostler responds to Lane Greene's article that defended the idea that MT cannot win the race against English to become the new lingua franca. The growth in populism that has been evident all over the world in the last few years suggests that, if there is a change in demand it has not been towards international, often multilingual, communication, but for a retreat to emphasis on local – monolingual – communication.

Author
nicholas-ostler

Nicholas Ostler is author of three books on language history, Empires of the Word (2005), Ad Infinitum (on Latin - 2007), and The Last Lingua Franca (2010). He is also Chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, a global charitable organization registered in England and Wales. A research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, he has also been a visiting professor at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, and L.N. Gumilev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. He holds an M.A. from Oxford University in Latin, Greek, philosophy and economics, and a 1979 Ph.D. in linguistics from M.I.T. He is an academician in the Russian Academy of Linguistics.

Related Articles
03/06/2025
Discover how AI and innovation are transforming the localization industry and challenging traditional methods.
21/11/2024
Celebrating the 20th anniversary of TAUS this month caused the team to look back at the predictions and outcomes so far. What have we achieved? What went wrong?
27/11/2023
Explore the fascinating journey of Lisa Vasileva, a Machine Learning Engineer at TAUS, as she transitions from a professional translator to the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP).