English as universal language

John McWhorter in World Affairs:

Even if the world’s currencies are someday tied to the renmimbi, English’s head start as the lingua franca of popular culture, scholarship, and international discourse would ensure its linguistic dominance. To change this situation would require a great many centuries, certainly too long a span to figure meaningfully in our assessment of the place of English in world communications in our present moment.

And notice how daunting the prospect of Chinese as a world language is, with a writing system that demands mastery of 2,000 characters in order to be able to read even a tabloid newspaper. For all of its association with Pepsi and the CIA, English is very user-friendly as the world’s 6,000 languages go. English verb conjugation is spare compared to, say, that of Italian—just the third-person singular s in the present, for example. There are no pesky genders to memorize (and no feminine-gendered tables that talk like Penelope Cruz). There are no sounds under whose dispensation you almost have to be born as a prerequisite for rendering them anywhere near properly, like the notorious trilly rˇ sound in Czech.

Each language is hard in its own way. Try explaining to a foreigner why, if you get a busy signal, you might say, “I’ll try her tomorrow,” but you can also say, “Tomorrow I turn 25,” without using the will to indicate the future. But as a language all people are required to learn, would it really be better to have one like Russian, with three genders, fiercely subtle and irregular verb marking, and numbers so hard to express properly that Russians themselves have trouble with them?

There are those who worry not only that English will become primus inter pares, but that it will finally eat up even the last remaining 600 languages as well. But this stretches the imagination, to be sure. As long as there are Japanese people meeting and raising children in Japan, amidst a culture in which Japanese is enshrined as the language of not only speech but education, literature, and journalism, it is hard to conceive even of the first step toward the day when a child raised in Osaka would speak English and think of Japanese as a language his parents spoke when they “didn’t want me to understand.” Eyak is one thing, but the languages spoken by substantial populations and well entrenched in writing are another.

The rest here.