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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).
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English is King but Technology May Trump All
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If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 28 2019, @04:09PM
Chinese will not become increasingly important, unless China winds up colonizing a portion of the Earth's surface equivalent to the British Empire, and then holding on to that territory for several centuries.
Chinese has significant barriers for non-speakers to overcome, such as 4 tones, characters, and many mutually-unintelligible dialects (eg. Cantonese, Mandarin, Shanghainese, etc). Chinese is also not closely related to other major languages around it. Korean and Japanese are somewhat similar to each other, but they are much different from Chinese. In other words a French speaker has a leg up in English because there is a lot of commonality there, but that's not true for Chinese and neighboring languages.
Washington DC delenda est.