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English is the most successful language in the history of the world. It is spoken on every continent, is learnt as a second language by schoolchildren and is the vehicle of science, global business and popular culture. Many think it will spread without end. But some scholars of the rise and fall of languages make a surprising prediction that the days of English as the world's lingua-franca may be numbered.
Conquest, trade and religion were the three biggest forces behind the spread of early lingua-franca. The Achaemenid emperors, conquerors of the Babylonians in 539 BC,spoke Persian as their native language, but pragmatically adopted Aramaic as the world's first "interlingua",i.e. International language.Official long-distance communications were written in Aramaic, sent across the empire and then translated from Aramaic upon arrival.Persian itself would serve as a lingua-franca not at the time of the empire's greatest heights but roughly from 1000 AD to 1800. The Turkic conquerors of Central Asia,Anatolia and the Middle East, though they adopted Islam and worshipped in Arabic,often kept Persian as the language of the court and of literature. Persian was also the court language of Turkic-ruled India when the British East India Company arrived.