Is English taking over the world?

Is the English language taking over the world? Private English-language school students in Egypt that “now struggle to speak Arabic” are part of a “global generation in which tens of mns of people from outside the English-speaking world speak perfect English,” the Financial Times’ Simon Kuper says. The number of English language students around the world is c. 10x higher than the collective number of people learning other languages, German linguist Ulrich Ammon estimates. “And the more people who speak English, the more useful English becomes.” That not only means that the US and UK will eventually “lose their dominance of media” — it’s bad news for non-English languages and literatures,” Kuper argues. “The next global ruling class will perceive the world chiefly in English. That will be a loss…[as] you can only see what your language allows you to express.”