The lingua franca comes from the dominant culture of the time. The massive colonial empire of Britain move things from latin to English and the rise and control of the US has perpetuated English even more so. If the Anglo countries all sank into the ocean, I doubt it would be very long until Mandarin developed into the dominant language. China would be the major trading power and without the need to work with America, there would be little need to continue with English as years progress.
There have been various movements that have advocated for the use of pinyin as a primary writing system, for the same reason that Beijing replaced Traditional script with Simplified.
> There have been various movements that have advocated for the use of pinyin as a primary writing system, for the same reason that Beijing replaced Traditional script with Simplified.
There are lots of homonyms but they are disambiguated by context. Look at it this way: you don’t need the characters when you’re listening to someone speak, so why wouldn’t you be able to sound out the phrase from pinyin and understand its meaning?
> There are lots of homonyms but they are disambiguated by context.
But wouldn't that lose something? My understanding is a lot of the puns specifically rely on the characters to force a different reading than the context would imply (or to evade censorship by having many ways to write the same sounds).
Well I would still say French would be dominant over Mandarin for several reasons. Technological advantages include current nuclear collaboration on the vast coast of China. China still does not have key infrastructure to self support.
