In the last few months that I have been traveling, it has become even more apparent to me how important it is to be able to speak English to interact in the world today.

Many of the people that I have been talking with over the last few months have not been native English speakers. And it became very clear to me that if they had not learned English, I would not be able to communicate with them, they have to learn a second language to be able to broaden their opportunities for travel, work, and general communication with people from other countries. As a native English speaker, you take this for granted. And as a result, many native English speakers only speak the one language.

As a result of the Industrial Revolution, the British economic predominance in the 19th century paved the way for colonialism of large geographical reach that spread the English language in the world. (1)

More importantly, the strong political and military predominance of the U.S. after W.W.II displaced French from the sphere of diplomacy and fixed English as the standard for International communication. (1)

English is spoken as a first language by more than 300million people around the world, and many millions more use it as a second language. One in five people speak English competently and within the next few years that number will exceed the number of native speakers. (2)

Because English is so widely spoken, it is often being referred to as a “Global Language”, the lingua franca (*) of the modern era.

The search for information and need for global communication have already promoted English from being the language of the American, the British, the Irish, the Australian, the New Zealand, the Canadian, the Caribbean and the South African peoples to being the International language. The Latin of the modern world, “spoken in every continent by approximately eight hundred million people” (1)

What centuries of British colonialism and decades of Esperanto (**) couldn’t do, a few years of free trade, MTV, and the internet has. English dominates international business, politics, and culture more than any other language in human history, and new words are melding into English at a frenetic rate. This could have a dramatic effect on the evolution of the language as it is absorbed by new cultures and gaining new forms of grammar and pronunciation.

“English is probably changing faster than any other language”, says Alan Firth, a linguist at the University of Aalborg in Denmark, “because so many people are using it”. (3)

Not everybody is in agreement and a few countries have tried to fight the spread of English as a global language. But with the interest growing stronger, not weaker, some linguists say: Why fight it? Rather English should be embraced.

“It’s a lost cause to try and fight against the tide” said Jacques Le’vy who studies globalism. (4)

It is predictable today that wealth will give way to knowledge and information in determining the shape of the future human society, and speaking the common world language will be fundamental to achieve success. (1)

(*) Lingua franca is a language widely used beyond the population of it’s native speakers.(2)

(**) Esperanto: An artificial language devised in 1887 as an international medium of communication. (2)