The Mother Tongue
Bill Bryson, 1990
“More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.
[…] English has become the most global of languages, the lingua franca of business, science, education, politics and pop music. […] When Volkswagen set up a factory in Shanghai it found that there were too few Germans who spoke Chinese and too few Chinese who spoke German, so now Volkswagen’s German engineers and Chinese managers communicate in a language that is alien to both of them, English. […]
For non-English speakers everywhere, English has become the common tongue. Even in France, the most determinedly non-English-speaking nation in the world, the war against English encroachment has largely been lost.
[…] English is, in short, one of the world’s great growth industries. […] Indeed, such is the demand to learn the language that there are now more students of English in China than there are people in the United States.”
http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/0380715430/ref=sib_rdr_dp
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