Originally Posted By: latishya
for some reason this made me think of the ubquity of English.


This reminds me of a tale I read once about a Sesame Street type program that was part of an attempt to instill a colloquial pan-Arabic. Liturgical Arabic is pretty much understood throughout the Muslim world but it isn't quite up to handling many modern situations. Colloquial Arabic is pretty variable across the Arabic speaking world and the Arabic of the western ends of North Africa is pretty much incomprehensible to speakers of, say, Iraqi Arabic. This show was trying to bridge that gap and the show itself was entirely in this pan-Arabic. The language in the control room was English.