My guess is that English will retain its currency in the world for the next 50 or so, but it is difficult to see it retaining it beyond then. If the Chinese could establish some reasonable way of writing their language by forming some sort of alphabeticisation, then given the exponential population growth among Chinese communities, their language would rapidly gain in importance. And let’s not forget Spanish; some predict that there will be a Spanish majority in the United States within twenty years. So it is not impossible to conceive that another language might come to dominate besides English one day. An equally important trend will be the fragmentation of English. Many countries are now using English so much that they are starting to teach their own particular brand of the language with different forms of sentence construction, for example. They no longer want native speakers to teach English, but locals whose version of English contains the same forms as the local use of the language. This is not just true in colonial countries, it’s happening as far apart as Germany and the Pacific Rim. It’s a strongly democratic move and I think we will see a lot more local publishing as a result. Yet while forms of English become increasingly localized, the information explosion is also making our use of language more global. A quite new form of language is evolving on the internet. The E - mail is a new form of message: it’s not a letter, not a postcard. And it has its own casual style, often without complete sentences. English is especially well adapted to this style, as it can easily be shortened. So I suspect English will continue to be more advanced than other languages on the worldwide web--it will remain the language of science and technology.