I believe that English is an enforced popularity contest. With America and Britain being economical superpowers, many countries in the world are forced to use English as the main business language.

That may have been the case a few decades ago, but now English is used by more non-native speakers than native speakers. Business, along with tourism, etc., is conducted around the world in English every day between millions of people who are not native speakers of English. It's the first global lingua franca.

There's nothing better about English than any other language, but at the first language in that position, it's taking on its own role beyond national/political functions. In some ways there's no need to replace it, simply because there is any language in that position. One effect will be that English will become less and less centralized around the US and the UK. Consider India, for example, but also various other places.


As for the original question about "best" lingua franca, I don't think that has an answer. Any language could be a lingua franca, and would be adapted (e.g. with vocabulary) to fit the role, but really, there are no linguistic properties that make one language better than another.

(Sure, you can imagine what properties a constructed language would have to offer, but the fundamental flaw is that basically no one speaks them, so you'd be starting from nothing to get it to catch on. And even if that worked, what would actually happen is that, say everyone started speaking Esperanto, it would become a natural language through usage. It would take on the same irregularities, idiosyncrasies and other features that make natural languages "imperfect", because that's what happens, naturally, through usage. Of course there are a few things we could do to improve the practicality of languages, like making teaching resources widely available, using an orthography that is easier to learn that the irregular spelling of English or the very large character inventory of Chinese, but plenty of languages already have that in place. The fact that the "biggest" languages don't also indicates that it really isn't so crucial to the "success" of a language. Those imperfect writing systems work fine and don't actually pose a practical limitation to the usage of those languages. In the end, there's nothing to "fix".)

In short, it doesn't matter what language is the lingua franca, but given that English is in place globally, it will probably stick around for a long time, regardless of geopolitical situations. Aside from the accidents of history, it could be any other language too. There aren't any linguistic reasons for the success of English.

I believe that English is an enforced popularity contest. With America and Britain being economical superpowers, many countries in the world are forced to use English as the main business language.

I have studied grammar aspects of many modern languages in the past 10 years, and i personally find English to be a very abstract and inaccurate language. For everyday communication, English sits with any other language in the world. As a business language, it depends on the nature of the business being discussed and the vocabulary needed to converse to others. Approaching vocabulary, English easily has the competency to be an extremely accurate language, but this would mean that one needs to learn a very sophisticated vocabulary: a vocabulary which is unnatural to everyday communication in English and would be difficult to understand by everyday speakers of English.

One of many examples to note the English word 'love'. Love has many aspects in English: the love of friends, the love of family, the love of hobbies/interests; the love of an intimate relationship and many other aspects. In other modern languages, these aspects would have their own lexicon for these specific purposes. 'Love' is just one of many other words that contain many aspects in the English language, and only context can make this clear. However, context isn't always clear in the English language. The problem concerning context of course exists in every language, but some languages deal with it better, far better, than the English language.

Which language could replace English as a lingua franca? Who knows. History shows the height and falls other lingua francas like Classical Greek/Latin, French, ecclesial latin, Classical Chinese, Ancient Egyptian and so many others. English at the moment is the cool, hip language the world wants to learn, that people believe will give them a better quality of life, a language that makes money, art and entertainment. But so does Hindi, Chinese Mandarin, Modern Standard Arabic and Russian (regrettably at the moment).

I'm not a scholar/expert on this matter, so I'm not telling anyone how to think or feel, but I thought I'd share my opinion without debate.

The Tenses of Verbs, Hans Reichenbach
http://www.derczynski.com/sheffield/tsie/Reichenbach%20-%20tenses%20of%20verbs.pdf

It is difficult to figure out the "theory" of the IPA, because it is a social construct developed over the centuries (well, it has been a work in progress for over a century), and it does not have any absolutely immutable principles (though changing the principle is similar to changing the US Constitution). One premise that seems to be the most true is that it is a system for notating segments (sounds). In the chart, half of the sub-charts are symbols for segments (consonants and vowels), and half are "diacritics" that describe general phonetic properties that can apply to a segment, for example [a] versus [ã].

On the one hand, IPA explicitly eschews diacritics (hence a separate symbol is required for [ʃ] as opposed to putting hacek on [ s ] to give [š]). Yet it also embraces diacriticky symbols, such as apostrophe for ejectives. The principle is that diacritics are acceptable when they represent general phonetic parameters of segment production. The dot-diacritic for retroflex and hacek for alveopalatal aren't general, they describe just one opposition (between alveolar and retroflex, or alveopalatal which they call postalveolar). It is still a puzzle why they use separate symbols θ ð for dental fricatives but diacritic modifications on t̪ d̪ for dental stops.

There is a tendency but not a strict principle that when a certain sound is phonemically contrastive in some language, there should be a separate symbol for it. If a phonetic property, on the other hand, is "general" to some level (intuitively, "it would be ridiculous to invent 20 new symbols in order to avoid using a diacritic"), one just uses the diacritic.

Theoretically, one could dispense with many of the IPA vowel letters, by using a diacritic. For example, we could get rid of [ɪ] and just write [i̞] (i with tack-down), and [ɛ] could be likewise notated as [e] with tack-down (which means "lowered"). Since that vowel difference is phonemic in many languages, there is a pressure to not use a diacritic. The phonetic fact that you noted between British vs. American English is not a phonemic contrast within a language. Therefore, to describe that difference, one can't call on different primary symbols, you have to appeal to diacritics. These same diacritics (raised, lowered, retracted tongue root, less round, more round) are used for more precise phonetic descriptions which don't rise to phonemic status within a single language / dialect, especially for describing contextual variants ("the vowel is slightly raised before velar consonants").

IPA is designed to make it possible to be more precise than "what is phonemic", but IMO it should be seen as a system for phonemic writing that has been augmented with other descriptive resources so that you can be a little bit more precise about phonetic properties.

IPA letters are quite vague at the level of phonemic contrast, which is why there are a dozen IPA-consistent transcriptions of English vowels as in "say", "go". Ideally, you use the symbol that is "closest" to the particular sound of the language. That means: you have to refer to the standard. https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/IPAcharts/inter_chart_2018/IPA_2018.html is the standard. It would be an interesting exercise to collect recordings of words by speakers of different dialects and then attempt to characterize the phonetic differences. I think British English has a lower, backer, rounder vowel that in the American pronunciation. You can use diacritics to describe that, or you can write the British vowel as [ɒ].

There is an IPA system which is supposed to have a symbol for each sound. When studying British and American English, I see that the same symbol is assigned to different sounds, depending on the accent.

I am watching videos by Rachel's English on Youtube (American accent). I find that [ɔ:], differs from the sound taught in the British accent. She is not alone in doing this, there is confusion everywhere.

According to this chart: https://www.phonemicchart.com/
There are 4 sounds that I would like to analyse:
 /ɔ/ (AmE -oo- "door")
 /ɔ:/ (BrE -oo- "door") - This sound is more closed and longer
 /ɑ/ (AmE -a- "far")
 /ɑ:/ (BrE -a- "far") - more closed than the above and longer, like an American "AW".

For example, if I had to transcribe the word "awesome" phonetically, I'd write:
 BrE we say --  /ˈɔːs(ə)m/
 AmE -- /ˈɑ:s(ə)m/

However,
1) many dictionaries (especially American ones) use another type of transcription (merriam-webster for example). It seems to my that Americans either decide not to use IPA or they dont know how... not sure. I’m lost.
2) This is what Cambridge says about the AmE and BrE pronunciation of awesome https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-spanish/awesome
The 2 dots ( : ) make the sound longer (although, in the examples of the 4 sounds above, I also detect more closure in vowel sounds when placing the dots).
I believe this isn't the case, though. It's a whole different sound when pronouncing AWESOME in BrE and in AmE.
If we check here https://www.ipachart.com/ and click on /ɔ/, we can clearly hear that this phoneme does not represent any sound in the American version of "awesome".
3) Rachel distinguishes between /ɔ/ (as in the American AW) and /ɑ/ (as in "Father" AmE).
The vowel sounds in AWESOME and in FATHER may have a slight, but almost unrecognizable difference, depending on each individual PERSON and their way of speaking. But, what I don't understand is how sounds were assigned to symbols that already exist and have totally different pronunciation.