English is currently one of the dominant languages on the planet due to the spread of the US and UK empires in the last century. With the rise of technology English may be made redundant with the advent of automatic language translation.
Just waiting for made up languages to become the norm (e.g. Esperanto), or hyper language learning.
Now ponder, as Douglas Hofstadter did, translating Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky from English into French, German, and Russian (Cyrillic .GIF) or (ASCII transliteration).
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @03:41PM
This has literally never been true. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-rates?year=1960&country=USA+GBR [ourworldindata.org]