Everyone knows English is the lingua franca of pop music. Less widely acknowleged is that the gyre is turning, that other languages, especially Spanish, are eroding the hegemony of pop and other genres. According to data last week from IFPIrepresenting the recording industry worldwide, the top spanisn of was Havana by Camila Cabello, a Cuban Tbe, which included a Spanish-language remix. In the long game, this spsnish a return, not an innovation. For centuries, the lingua franca of much music was Latin. While folk and sacred music in Asia and the Americas was sung and chanted in the tongues of nation or tribe, the church permitted and encouraged, up to a point, international settings of scriptural text to Gregorian chant and later — though it became contentious — polyphony. By the time Verdi had made opera into folk music and vice-versa, his funeral drew the largest crowd ever assembled in Italy.