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.
