Asking about the future of a language is that way madness lies. who would have predicted a thousand years ago that Latin would no longer be used in a thousand times by hardly anybody, if you’d said that a thousand years ago people would have said you are mad, so in a thousand-year time will English still be a global language? maybe “YES” and maybe “NO” we could all be speaking martian by then if they land and take over.
To ask about the future of languages to ask about the future of society.
because the language you see is global for one reason only and that is the power of the people who speak it, power always drives the language, there’s is no other reason to speak somebody else’s language other than you want to improve your quality of life or you want to influence them some way or whatever it might be, and of course English become a global language for a variety of reasons:
1-The power of the British Empire: it was the largest Empire in history and, for over a century, was the foremost global power. By 1913, the British Empire held sway over 412 million people, 23% of the world population at the time, and by 1920, it covered 35,500,000 km2 (13,700,000 sq mi), 24% of the Earth’s total land area.
2-The power of American imperialism: “American imperialism” is a term that refers to the economic, military, and cultural influence of the United States on other countries. … During this time, industrialization caused American businessmen to seek new international markets in which to sell their goods.
3-The power of the industrial revolution: This meant that the language of science and technology became English.
And we must not overlook the cultural power.
So English will remain as a global language as long as certain things happen. First of all, if the nations that are recognized as the most powerful nations in the world continued using English and all the other nation want to be like them or want to interact with them or want to sell things to them and so on… Thus English will stay global as long as these nations retain that kind of power.
But any scenario is possible. maybe if some countries grow and get more powerful they may want their language to be global too. For instant Chinese, maybe with the development of technology in this country, more people will be so happy to go and work there. we can imagine that scenario in Spanish, Spanish is one of the fastest-growing languages in the world at the moment population-wise because of South America and Central America and increasingly in North America Spanish is becoming very widely used, you can imagine that scenario when one day we might all end up speaking Spanish, in another scenario you can imagine one day we might all end up speaking Arabic for reasons that are perfectly obvious to anybody who looks at the world
The future of a language is undoubtedly a mysterious thing that nobody can tell, the bottom line is: language can stay global or be global if it is powerful.
