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Apuntes

**• Subtopic: Future of the English Language** The Economist Menu | Weekly edition | Search Prospero | Future English **Johnson: Simpler and More Foreign** A few guesses as to what English will look like in the coming decades and centuries. July 3rd, 2014 By R.L.G. | BERLIN Several weeks ago, Johnson discussed his debate with Nicholas Ostler about the lingua franca of the future. Johnson believes that English has a very long run ahead of it. Mr. Ostler, on the other hand, sees English’s time as coming to an end, to be replaced by machine-translation tools that will remove the need for people to learn to speak, read, and write a lingua franca. But we agreed that, regardless of what the long-term future might hold, the next few decades are set. No language has anything close to a chance of displacing English. Interestingly, about two-thirds of English speakers are not native speakers of English. To put it another way: English no longer belongs solely to England, to superpower America, or even to the English-speaking countries generally. Rather, English is now the world’s language. What happens to a language when it becomes everyone’s? Shaped by the mouths of billions of no...