The Foreign Service Journal, October 2011

O C T O B E R 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 27 worked with the Yemeni government and the local popu- lation. Under the motto “no security without develop- ment,” Hull successfully melded the security agenda important to Washington with the development agenda vital in the streets of Sanaa, thereby gaining buy-in from the Yemeni people, as well as from the government. Edmund Hull was U.S. ambassador to Yemen from 2001 to 2004. His other Foreign Service postings in- cluded Israel, Tunisia and Egypt. He earned the CIA’s George H.W. Bush Award for Excellence in Counterter- rorism for service in Washington, D.C. (1999-2001) and a Presidential Meritorious Service Award for his service in Sanaa. He currently consults for the U.S. military. (See p. 72 for a full review.) Excursions in Language While Looking for Today’s World “Lingua Franca” John R. Campbell, Campbell Publishing, Inc., 2011, $4.95, paperback, 73 pages. In this compact, highly comprehensible book, John R. Campbell uses a social science ap- proach rather than a structured linguistic analysis to determine the likeliest candidate for the “lingua franca” of the future. Having de- clared that “language is the bridge to international understanding,” Campbell sets about establishing criteria by which to judge the suit- ability of languages for broad or universal adoption. These include number of speakers, grammatical sim- plicity, precision of vocabulary, phonetic consistency and the language’s efficiency of script or “legibility.” He goes on to discuss the origin of writing in the ancient graphic languages of the Middle East, South and East Asia, and Mesoamerica and their transition (with the exception of Chinese) into phonetic scripts. This is followed by a brief comparative analysis of the five prime candidates for a lingua franca, the world’s five most widely spoken languages: Chinese, English, Span- C OVER S TORY