When and how did English become the Lingua Franca?

How did English become the lingua franca of the USA?

• People from all over the world migrated to the USA years back. But, why did they adopt English as the lingua franca? Why not Spanish, German, Italian, Hebrew, etc.?

• Answer:

  The colonies which eventually made up the United States were established by the British. The majority of the first settlers were English-speakers, the leadership of the colonies were English-speakers, all official business was done in English, etc. The non-British colonies of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Netherland and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Sweden briefly existed, but after their annexation by the British, the Dutch and Swedish populations were greatly outnumbered by English and German settlers. The second largest population was African slaves. Besides not having a unified language, they worked for English-speaking plantation owners, so they had to learn English. Slaves along the east coast developed the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah_language, a creole language largely based on English, but the speaking population is relatively small. By the time of the first US Census in 1790, 66% of the population was of British ancestry, 19% was African, 7% was German, and 3% was Dutch. Much of the remainder is unknown due to lost records (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_immigration_to_the_United_States). English was the clear dominant language when the United States was founded, which shouldn't be too surprising as all the Founding Fathers were native English speakers. With a Constitution written in English and legislative sessions being held in English, English was the de facto language of the state. Even in the event of a significant influx of non-English speaking immigrants, the position of English was well entrenched. Despite high levels of immigration, the percentage of the US population born outside of the US has never exceeded 15% (http://www.census.gov/how/infographics/foreign_born.html). Even then, the British Isles remained the single largest source of immigrants until at least 1930 (http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/tab04.html). The remainder of non-English speakers would have been split between speakers of German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, etc. None of these populations would have had been large enough or influential enough to displace English as even a local lingua franca. To interact with those outside their community, they would have had to learn English. Today, the percentage of people using foreign languages is probably the highest it has ever been, as of 2000, 18% of people spoke a language other than English at home and that number is likely higher now (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Spoken_at_Home_%28U.S._Census%29). A big difference is that among these languages, Spanish is clearly the most dominant. However, this should give a good idea why no other language has displaced English. Even though Spanish may be the most widely spoken foreign language ever in the US, the vast majority of Americans are monolingual English-speakers who will never have any need to learn another language. One other consideration, even though a large portion of what is now the US was originally Mexican territory, this land was very sparsely populated, with only about 8,000 settlers in California prior to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E2%80%93American_War. Political instability in Mexico had hampered settlement of the region. By 1854, just 8 years after the war, there were over 300,000. Spanish was quickly displaced as the dominant regional language in most of the southwest.