ABSTRACT
Wherever people meet in an inter-ethnic or international context either they have to decide which language to use, or they find that the decision has been made for them by conventions established earlier. This conference, for instance, was held in English with some papers in French-a common pattern for such events. Such choices are evidently not determined by the sheer number of speakers a language has; were that so, Chinese would be the dominant world language, and Russian and German, the languages with the greatest number of speakers in Europe, would have a more marked presence on the European scene than they do. For a variety of reasons the history of language use has taken a different course.
