A few different bits and pieces that I thought were interesting:
(3) http://exchanges.state.gov/forum/vols/vol38/no1/p2.htm
(US state department)
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Role of English in the 21st Century:</b>
[...]
<b>Conclusion</b>
      English has been an international language for only 50 years. If the pattern follows the previous language trends, we still have about 100 years before a new language dominates the world. However, this does not mean that English is replacing or will replace other languages as many fear. Instead, it may supplement or co-exist with languages by allowing strangers to communicate across linguistic boundaries. It may become one tool that opens windows to the world, unlocks doors to opportunities, and expands our minds to new ideas.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Good plan: Sell all our Indian languages - some of which we've had for many millennia - and learn English which we can possibly keep for another estimated 100 years (as per extrapolation) or maybe 200 years! After which we can toss that away and move on again, as if we were linguistic nomads. At that point it doesn't matter if we switch from English to any other language anyway, we would already have lost our own.
(4) http://www.aiic.net/ViewPage.cfm/page731.htm
This is an article that's rather good reading, even if not everything it says is wholly accurate. Pasting a large segment from it:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The notion of an international language and the case of English
Martin WOODING offers a broad perspective on the rise and fall of lingua francas.</b>
<b>To begin with: a dose of relativity</b>
Over the entire course of recorded history, languages have gone in and out of fashion as a preferred tool of international communication. At the dawn of civilisation in the ancient Middle East, Egyptian rose to preeminence among nations; by the end of the Middle Ages it was extinct. In the Hellenistic period, Greek was spoken all the way from Athens to the banks of the Amu Darya in Central Asia; now it is confined to the southern extremity of the Balkan peninsula. <b>Latin once reigned supreme over European territory south of the Danube and west of the Rhine, not to mention North Africa;</b> it even survived the fall of Rome by well over a millennium, and was actively used by scholars as a pan-European language as late as the eighteenth century. <b>Today Latin is no longer used for communication (except in the Vatican), and appears to be rapidly disappearing from school curricula.</b>
(Umm, the christian church manufactured illiteratis in Latin, the priests had even ruined Latin - see McCabe.Â
It was only later, in the Renaissance and afterwards in the Enlightenment, that people tried to resurrect Latin again.)
<b>These examples serve to demonstrate that there is nothing new about the concept of an international language, and equally that no one language has secured this status permanently,</b> though the life span of a successful international language is a long one, amounting to a thousand years or more. None of the languages mentioned extended their sway beyond a certain region of the globe; other regions have seen the development of their own international languages (like Arabic in the countries of Maghreb and Mashreq, Mandarin Chinese in South-East Asia or Swahili in Eastern Africa). What is different about todayâs situation is not so much essence as scale: for the first time in history, due to the political developments and technological progress, it is possible to speculate about the emergence of a global language.
<b>Language and political power</b>
The status of a language is less a function of how many people speak it, than of who those people are and what power they possess. Past international languages have achieved their position purely through the military and economic expansion of the nations which spoke them. It was the hoplites of Alexander the Great who took Greek from its classical homeland to the depths of Asia, the legionaries of Rome who spread Latin beyond its obscure origins in a provincial town of central Italy, and the warriors of the Prophet who carried Arabic from Medina to Damascus and Tunis. In this process, the motivation for conquest had nothing to do with language, nor did conscious administrative steps usually have to be taken by the conquerors to impose the use of their tongue. Rather, the control which the conquerors exerted over the economic life of their territories led, as a practical matter of survival, to the wider use of their language by subject peoples.
In some cases, the imperial language, without any special effort, managed to eliminate native languages altogether. The case of Latin is best known; over a period of five hundred years or more, it totally supplanted the Celtic and other languages spoken in large areas of the Empire. No language, however, achieves such feats without serious cost to its own integrity. As long as an international language is spoken by a well-educated elite using some kind of central standard, it retains a degree of homogeneity; but if it is to be adopted by a broad mass of people who learn by word of mouth and care little for grammar or pronunciation, then it is going to be seriously distorted. This is a process which linguists call creolisation and it has been responsible for the Romance languages of todayâs Europe, each of which is, in its own way, a thoroughly debased and mangled version of the language of Cicero.
(The various Italian dialects, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italic languages in Switzerland and on the Franco-Italiano border are all due to creolisation of Latin. Pidgins are somewhat different from creoles.)
The political facts of life behind international languages are occasionally forgotten by those who approach language in a romantic spirit. To linguists, language is a matter of fascination. It is easy to be carried away by contemplation of the intricate structures and originality of a given language. It is thus that many have recommended the virtues of this or that language for international status purely on the grounds of the number of nominal cases or the absence of grammatical gender. These matters play no role in the practical choices of non-linguists. Language is a tool of communication and that is its sole reason for being. Its fate is decided by the great mass of non-linguists, who are in turn affected by politics. By most standards, for example, Russian is not an easy language; it has six cases and three genders, and obeys very complex phonetic rules. This did not impede it in any way from being the common language of ordinary citizens everywhere within the vast Soviet Union, and has not stopped it from being adopted as an official language in Central Asian countries even after the breakup of the Union.
<b>The current world situation</b>
At the dawn of the third millennium, the United States holds supreme global power. The existence of a single global superpower is a novelty in historical terms. The USA has seen off its only real rival, the USSR, and potential future challengers, like China, have a long way to go before making good their threat. Today, the US accounts by itself for 22 % of world GDP and no less than 36% of world spending on armaments.
(Oh, don't write off Russia. The only actual battle for which the outcome would be unpredictable is between China and Russia.)
<b>By a quirk of history the people of todayâs superpower speak the same language as those of the country that dominated much of the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.</b> At the height of its power the British Empire embraced one fifth of the earthâs land area. Many of the countries formerly ruled by the British have continued to give special status to the English language. Those at the core of the English-speaking world (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US itself) all derived their language from British settlers and with it supplanted the indigenous languages formerly spoken on their territories. In other countries of Africa and Asia, where there is sometimes a large number of local languages, English has been found useful as a national lingua franca and enjoys either official or quasi-official status. Taken together, the countries in which English has maintained a special place in the wake of past British imperialism account for more than of a third of the worldâs population.
<b>The situation in which the Americans acceded to global power was thus one in which their language had already acquired global status.</b>
<b>The situation in Europe</b>
After the civil strife of 1939-45, the European powers found their resources too depleted to aspire to world leadership. Their continent became divided between the two remaining powers, the USA and Russia. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was set up to bind the Western half of Europe to the US. Britain did not hesitate to throw in its lot with the Americans. Germany, deprived of its eastern half, also became heavily dependent on the US. France alone had qualms about the extent of American power, and sought to create a European counterweight through which it might regain some of its lost influence. The European Community was born.
In the decades immediately following the Second World War, the western half of Europe had two languages which might have aspired to international status in the region. In the south (Italy, Spain, Portugal), French tended to be treated as the most natural foreign language; whilst in the north (Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia), English tended to be favoured. German, itself a budding international language before the War, underwent a serious setback with the defeat of Germany and the amputation of a certain German-speaking hinterland to the east and south-east. In the eastern part of Europe, the international language was Russian, though fewer people had the option of international contacts.
By the late nineteen-seventies French was already showing signs of giving way to English in western Europe. A symbolic watershed was the use of English by French president Valéry Giscard dâEstaing and German chancellor Helmut Schmidt to cultivate their notably close relationship. Both Giscard and Schmidt began their political careers in the post-war period, in a world in which American power was already a fact. Both also began with a specialisation in economics, a branch of science in which English dominates as in no other.
Less than fifty years after the end of the Second World War, the sole remaining European power with global ambitions, Russia, was also found to have overextended itself. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, the Americans emerged as the ultimate victors of the Cold War. As a result, a whole generation of Eastern Europeans has plunged headlong into the study of English.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->The article goes on at the given link, so read if interested.
WWII changed everything in a way.
Every single article I've looked at today says the same thing: proliferation of English is only due to British colonialism and nothing else. And this article makes that clear and adds to it that Americans therefore merely inherited a favourable situation for their language.
If Rome could fall - by all means more organised than any 'superpowah' today - anything can happen.
Another world war can once again change the dynamics on the ground. The Golden Rule: whoever's got the gold makes the rules. No doubt there will be psecular opportunists then as well, ready to sell what others have. But one thing is certain, if we don't keep our languages, once they're gone they're gone (out of common usage) forever.
(3) http://exchanges.state.gov/forum/vols/vol38/no1/p2.htm
(US state department)
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Role of English in the 21st Century:</b>
[...]
<b>Conclusion</b>
      English has been an international language for only 50 years. If the pattern follows the previous language trends, we still have about 100 years before a new language dominates the world. However, this does not mean that English is replacing or will replace other languages as many fear. Instead, it may supplement or co-exist with languages by allowing strangers to communicate across linguistic boundaries. It may become one tool that opens windows to the world, unlocks doors to opportunities, and expands our minds to new ideas.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Good plan: Sell all our Indian languages - some of which we've had for many millennia - and learn English which we can possibly keep for another estimated 100 years (as per extrapolation) or maybe 200 years! After which we can toss that away and move on again, as if we were linguistic nomads. At that point it doesn't matter if we switch from English to any other language anyway, we would already have lost our own.
(4) http://www.aiic.net/ViewPage.cfm/page731.htm
This is an article that's rather good reading, even if not everything it says is wholly accurate. Pasting a large segment from it:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The notion of an international language and the case of English
Martin WOODING offers a broad perspective on the rise and fall of lingua francas.</b>
<b>To begin with: a dose of relativity</b>
Over the entire course of recorded history, languages have gone in and out of fashion as a preferred tool of international communication. At the dawn of civilisation in the ancient Middle East, Egyptian rose to preeminence among nations; by the end of the Middle Ages it was extinct. In the Hellenistic period, Greek was spoken all the way from Athens to the banks of the Amu Darya in Central Asia; now it is confined to the southern extremity of the Balkan peninsula. <b>Latin once reigned supreme over European territory south of the Danube and west of the Rhine, not to mention North Africa;</b> it even survived the fall of Rome by well over a millennium, and was actively used by scholars as a pan-European language as late as the eighteenth century. <b>Today Latin is no longer used for communication (except in the Vatican), and appears to be rapidly disappearing from school curricula.</b>
(Umm, the christian church manufactured illiteratis in Latin, the priests had even ruined Latin - see McCabe.Â
It was only later, in the Renaissance and afterwards in the Enlightenment, that people tried to resurrect Latin again.)
<b>These examples serve to demonstrate that there is nothing new about the concept of an international language, and equally that no one language has secured this status permanently,</b> though the life span of a successful international language is a long one, amounting to a thousand years or more. None of the languages mentioned extended their sway beyond a certain region of the globe; other regions have seen the development of their own international languages (like Arabic in the countries of Maghreb and Mashreq, Mandarin Chinese in South-East Asia or Swahili in Eastern Africa). What is different about todayâs situation is not so much essence as scale: for the first time in history, due to the political developments and technological progress, it is possible to speculate about the emergence of a global language.
<b>Language and political power</b>
The status of a language is less a function of how many people speak it, than of who those people are and what power they possess. Past international languages have achieved their position purely through the military and economic expansion of the nations which spoke them. It was the hoplites of Alexander the Great who took Greek from its classical homeland to the depths of Asia, the legionaries of Rome who spread Latin beyond its obscure origins in a provincial town of central Italy, and the warriors of the Prophet who carried Arabic from Medina to Damascus and Tunis. In this process, the motivation for conquest had nothing to do with language, nor did conscious administrative steps usually have to be taken by the conquerors to impose the use of their tongue. Rather, the control which the conquerors exerted over the economic life of their territories led, as a practical matter of survival, to the wider use of their language by subject peoples.
In some cases, the imperial language, without any special effort, managed to eliminate native languages altogether. The case of Latin is best known; over a period of five hundred years or more, it totally supplanted the Celtic and other languages spoken in large areas of the Empire. No language, however, achieves such feats without serious cost to its own integrity. As long as an international language is spoken by a well-educated elite using some kind of central standard, it retains a degree of homogeneity; but if it is to be adopted by a broad mass of people who learn by word of mouth and care little for grammar or pronunciation, then it is going to be seriously distorted. This is a process which linguists call creolisation and it has been responsible for the Romance languages of todayâs Europe, each of which is, in its own way, a thoroughly debased and mangled version of the language of Cicero.
(The various Italian dialects, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italic languages in Switzerland and on the Franco-Italiano border are all due to creolisation of Latin. Pidgins are somewhat different from creoles.)
The political facts of life behind international languages are occasionally forgotten by those who approach language in a romantic spirit. To linguists, language is a matter of fascination. It is easy to be carried away by contemplation of the intricate structures and originality of a given language. It is thus that many have recommended the virtues of this or that language for international status purely on the grounds of the number of nominal cases or the absence of grammatical gender. These matters play no role in the practical choices of non-linguists. Language is a tool of communication and that is its sole reason for being. Its fate is decided by the great mass of non-linguists, who are in turn affected by politics. By most standards, for example, Russian is not an easy language; it has six cases and three genders, and obeys very complex phonetic rules. This did not impede it in any way from being the common language of ordinary citizens everywhere within the vast Soviet Union, and has not stopped it from being adopted as an official language in Central Asian countries even after the breakup of the Union.
<b>The current world situation</b>
At the dawn of the third millennium, the United States holds supreme global power. The existence of a single global superpower is a novelty in historical terms. The USA has seen off its only real rival, the USSR, and potential future challengers, like China, have a long way to go before making good their threat. Today, the US accounts by itself for 22 % of world GDP and no less than 36% of world spending on armaments.
(Oh, don't write off Russia. The only actual battle for which the outcome would be unpredictable is between China and Russia.)
<b>By a quirk of history the people of todayâs superpower speak the same language as those of the country that dominated much of the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.</b> At the height of its power the British Empire embraced one fifth of the earthâs land area. Many of the countries formerly ruled by the British have continued to give special status to the English language. Those at the core of the English-speaking world (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US itself) all derived their language from British settlers and with it supplanted the indigenous languages formerly spoken on their territories. In other countries of Africa and Asia, where there is sometimes a large number of local languages, English has been found useful as a national lingua franca and enjoys either official or quasi-official status. Taken together, the countries in which English has maintained a special place in the wake of past British imperialism account for more than of a third of the worldâs population.
<b>The situation in which the Americans acceded to global power was thus one in which their language had already acquired global status.</b>
<b>The situation in Europe</b>
After the civil strife of 1939-45, the European powers found their resources too depleted to aspire to world leadership. Their continent became divided between the two remaining powers, the USA and Russia. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was set up to bind the Western half of Europe to the US. Britain did not hesitate to throw in its lot with the Americans. Germany, deprived of its eastern half, also became heavily dependent on the US. France alone had qualms about the extent of American power, and sought to create a European counterweight through which it might regain some of its lost influence. The European Community was born.
In the decades immediately following the Second World War, the western half of Europe had two languages which might have aspired to international status in the region. In the south (Italy, Spain, Portugal), French tended to be treated as the most natural foreign language; whilst in the north (Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia), English tended to be favoured. German, itself a budding international language before the War, underwent a serious setback with the defeat of Germany and the amputation of a certain German-speaking hinterland to the east and south-east. In the eastern part of Europe, the international language was Russian, though fewer people had the option of international contacts.
By the late nineteen-seventies French was already showing signs of giving way to English in western Europe. A symbolic watershed was the use of English by French president Valéry Giscard dâEstaing and German chancellor Helmut Schmidt to cultivate their notably close relationship. Both Giscard and Schmidt began their political careers in the post-war period, in a world in which American power was already a fact. Both also began with a specialisation in economics, a branch of science in which English dominates as in no other.
Less than fifty years after the end of the Second World War, the sole remaining European power with global ambitions, Russia, was also found to have overextended itself. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, the Americans emerged as the ultimate victors of the Cold War. As a result, a whole generation of Eastern Europeans has plunged headlong into the study of English.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->The article goes on at the given link, so read if interested.
WWII changed everything in a way.
Every single article I've looked at today says the same thing: proliferation of English is only due to British colonialism and nothing else. And this article makes that clear and adds to it that Americans therefore merely inherited a favourable situation for their language.
If Rome could fall - by all means more organised than any 'superpowah' today - anything can happen.
Another world war can once again change the dynamics on the ground. The Golden Rule: whoever's got the gold makes the rules. No doubt there will be psecular opportunists then as well, ready to sell what others have. But one thing is certain, if we don't keep our languages, once they're gone they're gone (out of common usage) forever.