Bangui, Central African Republic. The French language retains some of its former influence in the former French colonies in Africa. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Countering the assertion by John McWhorter at the New republic that learning French is pointless [1], Pascal Emmanuel Gobry writes on his Forbes blog that French might just be the language of the future [2]:
French isn’t mostly spoken by French people, and hasn’t been for a long time now. The language is growing fast, and growing in the fastest-growing areas of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. The latest projection is that French will be spoken by 750 million people by 2050. A study by investment bank Natixis even suggests that by that time, French could be the most-spoken language in the world, ahead of English and even Mandarin.
Global Voices translators weighed in a month ago on the challenges and the benefits of learning French [3].