ABSTRACT
Why has English become the medium of global communication? Latin held sway in the Western World as the language of learning and international scholarship throughout the Middle Ages. With the growth of the national vernaculars in Western Europe Latin was gradually displaced, and in post-Renaissance Europe largely replaced by the language associated with the major hegemonic state of that time: the French of France. The second major change was that the world, especially the Western world, was beginning to grow economically closer together. Under these circumstances religion became less important as the glue which held the West together and a replacement was needed that was more closely associated with the great new revolutions, the Commercial and the Industrial Revolutions. The candidate would be the language of one of the great new global imperial masters – Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, or English. In the case of English there was an almost unbelievable constellation of factors which favored its ever more rapid advancement to the status of global language. English had the unique advantage of being the language of the first country in which the Industrial Revolution took place, which meant the early establishment of an industrial basis which led to a positive balance of trade. Furthermore, just as the British Empire with all its consequences for the spread of English had passed its apogee sometime between the beginning of World War I and the end of World War II, the United States effectively took its place as the economic leader of the world and the military, political, and cultural leader of the West; and the language of both was English.
