Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
“Until recently, the story of English was broadly similar to that of other global languages: it spread through a combination of conquest, trade and colonisation. But then, at some point between the end of the second world war and the start of the new millenium, English made a jump in primacy that no amount of talk about it as a “lingua franca” or “global language” truly captures. It transformed from a dominant language to what the Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan calls a “hypercentral” one.”