ABSTRACT
As early as 1780, John Adams, one of the founding fathers of the
United States of America and its second president, commented that
‘English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more
generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French
is in the present age’ (Adams, 1852). Throughout the 1800s others
echoed his prediction. But it was not until the second half of the
twentieth century that his prediction became a literal reality.
