English may be today's world language, but that's just temporary. The two emerging economic blocks in the world are the EU and China, none of them accepting English as a standard. They just use it, by lack of alternatives. The french and the germans will never ever accept english to be the standard language in the EU (not only because of the retarded attitude of the UK (and the US) towards Europe), and the chance of China accepting it is even smaller. I presume the EU will at some stage, because of the mere impossibility of good government with dozens of representatives of countries speaking different languages, come up with a general 'language' to use between the different member states at the highest level (European Parliament, legislation, military, maybe even schooling in all countries) and this will be done in cooperation with China, Russia and maybe other countries like India or Iran. The common drive behind this might be the dominance of english-speaking countries. It might be an esperanto-like language, initially only spoken by the governing elite, or used for schooling, or interaction with intelligent machines,... Anyway, it probably won't be english, and certainly not today's english.
Slashdot Mirror
English may be today's world language, but that's just temporary. The two emerging economic blocks in the world are the EU and China, none of them accepting English as a standard. They just use it, by lack of alternatives. The french and the germans will never ever accept english to be the standard language in the EU (not only because of the retarded attitude of the UK (and the US) towards Europe), and the chance of China accepting it is even smaller. I presume the EU will at some stage, because of the mere impossibility of good government with dozens of representatives of countries speaking different languages, come up with a general 'language' to use between the different member states at the highest level (European Parliament, legislation, military, maybe even schooling in all countries) and this will be done in cooperation with China, Russia and maybe other countries like India or Iran. The common drive behind this might be the dominance of english-speaking countries. It might be an esperanto-like language, initially only spoken by the governing elite, or used for schooling, or interaction with intelligent machines,... Anyway, it probably won't be english, and certainly not today's english.