Whoa, Anna, that is a WAY LONG article, Sweetie!
I'll copy part of it:
"English is a system of communication, and highly germane to it is what or who speakers of English care to communicate with, and about what. The more we need to use English to communicate with machines -- or with people whose fluency is limited or whose understanding of English does not coincide with ours -- the more simplified the language will need to be.
And yet technology is expanding English, by requiring us to come up with new words to describe all the possibilities it offers. " She goes on to mention emoticons! (Question: did she know she was YARTing?
)
At first I was thinking, "This is true", but then I realized that it is true for
any language!
One of her main points was that there are more non-native-English speakers in the world than native English-speakers. She also mentioned something that I had been unaware of: that significant numbers of non-English users are now gaining access to the Internet.
But one thing that she didn't mention except tangentially, is something that I feel is very important in determining whether English will become "the" global language: the fact that this development, in my opinion, will be tied to
economics, and as far as I know, native English speakers have the majority of the world's wealth. I've always heard the expression, "money talks", and in this context it may
have a literal interpretation!
One thing this article gave me was a link to babel fish, so I added it to my Favorites. Maybe I'll eventually try to
figure out how to work it. It looked pretty daunting to me.
