Why does France think the French language is soooo important?

[IanC]

@Orinoco

I think the larger question is why do English speakers have such an attachment to English, which is hard to spell, has multiple exceptions to every rule, and borrows with such abandon from other languages that it would be hard to describe it as anything other than a sophisticated pidgin language.

I think it’s more to do with the English than the language itself. England is the best, therefore English is the best, and it’s spoken by so many that one can get by in most places in the world knowing only English.

We’ve also got a national hatred, at least at some joking level, of particular other nations. The Germans, the French, the Spanish (to a lesser degree though). That covers some of the main alternative languages for us (in the western world).