is the english language taking over?

Last year, the British Councill looked at the future of the English language - and asked:

Will English remain the world’s most sought-after language?

For the foreseeable future English will remain the dominant global lingua franca (a language used by people with different native languages to communicate with each other), but the role it plays in the lives of individuals or in policies will begin to change.

Numbers of learners will remain stable or rise in the next ten years. The main drivers for this are education, employment, technology and global mobility. Employers, parents and learners themselves are driving the need for English language education. They see it as a necessity for success in life, learning and employment.

In our rapidly changing world what is the future of the English language? | British Council

Five years ago, the writer Jacob Mikanowski wrote about the dominance of the English language - which was later put into a podcast:

No language in history has dominated the world quite like English does today. Is there any point in resisting?

From the archive: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet – podcast | News | The Guardian

This is from the original full piece:

Behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief: English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago, it has grown to vast size and astonishing influence. Almost 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. It is an official language in at least 59 countries, the unofficial lingua franca of dozens more. No language in history has been used by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe. It is aspirational: the golden ticket to the worlds of education and international commerce, a parent’s dream and a student’s misery, winnower of the haves from the have-nots. It is inescapable: the language of global business, the internet, science, diplomacy, stellar navigation, avian pathology. And everywhere it goes, it leaves behind a trail of dead: dialects crushed, languages forgotten, literatures mangled.

Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet | Language | The Guardian

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