English Is Here to Stay

Even if the world’s currencies are someday tied to the renmimbi, English’s head start as the lingua franca of popular culture, scholarship, and international discourse would ensure its linguistic dominance. To change this situation would require a great many centuries, certainly too long a span to figure meaningfully in our assessment of the place of English in world communications in our present moment.

And notice how daunting the prospect of Chinese as a world language is, with a writing system that demands mastery of 2,000 characters in order to be able to read even a tabloid newspaper. For all of its association with Pepsi and the CIA, English is very user-friendly as the world’s 6,000 languages go.

Thus spake John McWhorter — The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English. I tell my students the same thing at the beginning of each new semester. I even take it a step further; if every last native speaker of English were to die, English would survive just as Latin did in the Middle Ages.