English as a growing lingua franca, and why Mandarin is unlikely to replace it

Two interesting posts on the subject by linguistics professor Geoffrey Pullum, “There Was No Committee” (2014), mostly about English, and “The Awful Chinese Writing System” (this Wednesday), mostly about Mandarin. Some excerpts: Ph.D. students in countries like Finland or the Netherlands have (at least in my field) long been writing their dissertations in English rather […]