Though China's become the world's factory, due to a combination of historical circumstance, linguistic imperialsm and the information economy, English is now THE World Language. Must also have to do with the fact it's so infernally time consuming to learn a sufficent number (tens of thousands) of ideographs. For us foreigners, anyway, I think the Chinese writing system is an impediment on some level. Then there are some other potential International Languages. Some are "too tough" gramatically... German, Russian, for example. Arabic is fraught with much linguistic complexity and a difficult script. French is hard to pronounce for many billions of non-French. As if by by default, Americanese and British have become what the World settled on for a huge amount of its international discourse. May we live in interesting times! Not saying English and it's dialects is (are) the "Best" language, either. English can be damn tricky! Am I "off-base?" "Off-base." That expression appears to be unique to English? Much of our "Official English" orthography - the way the language is WRITTEN - is approximately 400 years obsolete. Much of the current spelling more accurately reflects the pronunciations of "Elizabethan" England. Good Gawd, did I spell it right? Disagree?
Feel free to tell me.... OFF.
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