The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel, by Nicholas Ostler, Allen Lane RRP £20, 313 pages
People whose first language is English are apt to be complacent about its pre-eminence. English is seen as indomitable – ruling the worlds of business, science and entertainment. Yet in The Last Lingua Franca, Nicholas Ostler serves up a bold corrective to Anglo-centrism and its familiar flag-waving myopia.
Ostler, a Briton who chairs the Foundation for Endangered Languages, opens with the provocative statement that “the decline of English, when it begins, will not seem of great moment”. The key word here is “when”; Ostler is advancing not some tentative hypothesis, but a grand polemic. He maintains that any lingua franca is by its very nature a language of convenience, and that pretty soon international English will cease to be convenient and “will be dropped, without ceremony, and with little emotion”.