The argument in the above writeup is all very fine and good, and may even point to a real trend. Before you start brushing up on your Esperanto
(or whatever), you should take the following point into account:
The number of people for whom English
is a second
language is probably several times the number of primary speakers. Not only that, many languages have dozens and even hundreds of loanword
s from English.
Many widely-spoken "universal" languages (Swahili
) are really combinations of several languages, created when peoples who spoke widely differing languages found themselves living together.
No-one really knows if everyone
will eventually wind up speaking the same language, but if they do, it won't be English as she is spoke
, it will most likely be some combination of several languages(with a good bit of English