Forget Mandarin Chinese. From “the unwritten tongue of Iron Age tribes in Denmark” two thousand years ago to a language spoken by one in every three people on the planet today, English is now “so deeply entrenched in print, education and media that switching to anything else would entail an enormous effort.”
So it looks like English is becoming the scrappy little language that could.
I remember doing some research for a paper in college—yes, it was a while ago, but not that far back—during which I learned that English was spoken by a quarter of the world’s population. So: from one in four to one in three in a single generation. Still think the high school foreign language requirement is a good idea?
