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And, besides that, English has an alphabet. It doesn't have much of an orthography, but it has one.
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* The etymology of "lingua franca" is more complicated than "'the French language' in old Italian." That definition is true, but not complete.
The original lingua franca was a pastiche of Italian and eastern-Mediterranean tongues.
"Lingua Franca" — the name of the ad hoc language — was a misnomer, likely based upon a tendency of traders in that realm to generalize the European languages as "Frankish."
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*English is currently the first language in business, aviation, science, and technology.
In matters of international diplomacy, English has "partially displaced" French — which is a diplomatic way of saying "has replaced."
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* There are between 870 million and 890 million first-language speakers of Mandarin, the largest of several forms of Chinese which are mutually unintelligible in spoken form.
In the early 21st century, young native Chinese speakers are losing the ability to write in the complicated ideogramatic system of characters because much of their communication occurs electronically — thus via keyboard, and thus in the form of phoneticization — they're spelling out the sounds of their language using the Latin alphabet.
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