The Great Debate 2: MT simply can't win this race.

10/09/2018

Lane Greene is firm that MT cannot win against English as the lingua franca. Greene explains why he thinks that English is the language of the future. If any character on earth epitomizes unwillingness to learn English, it is the Parisian waiter. This figure will not only refuse to speak English. He will correct your French if you speak less than perfectly. Now, this is mostly a myth.

Author
lane-greene

Lane Greene is the language columnist and an editor at The Economist, based in London. Previous assignments have included culture, European business, law, energy, the environment, and American politics. He is based in London, after living in Berlin and New York. Greene is the author of two books, Talk on the Wild Side (2018) and You Are What you Speak (2011), and won the journalism award from the Linguistic Society of America in 2017. He is a former adjunct assistant professor in Global Affairs at New York University, and is a consultant to Freedom House, a non-governmental organization. He received an M.Phil. from Oxford in European politics, and a B.A. with honors from Tulane in international relations and history, and speaks nine languages. Greene was born in Johnson City, Tennessee and grew up in Marietta, Georgia. He lives in London with his wife and sons.

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