Language Wars

Prior to 1990, intercultural interactions took place in a variety of languages. Diplomats might hold a meeting in the Middle East in French, a British tourist and a Polish hotel manager would negotiate the price of a room in broken German, an American working in the Philippines might resort to his high school Spanish to make himself understood by people whose native language contained many Spanish loan-words. Today all of these conversations would take place in English. Accelerated globalization has levelled linguistic diversity. Half the world’s 6,000 to 7,000 languages are forecast to disappear within the next generation as country people migrate to the cities; prestigious languages, such as French and German, have lost their former cross-cultural clout. English has become the working language of the European Union, the language of travel in Asia, the most popular language on the internet, the language of business and the default lingua franca of...