English, seeds of speech In the near future.

1.5 billion people, a quarter of the world the population will speak English. For 1.1 billion, it will a second or third language. English is rapidly becoming a language for business, science and popular culture. Three quarters of the world's mail and 80% of the electronic mail on the Internet use English.
There aren't linguistic reasons for this global dominance of English. The grammar is difficult, the pronunciation eccentric, and the spelling peculiar. Maybe the reason is the flexibility of the English language which incorporates words from more than 150 different languages. As English spreads across Australia, Asia and Africa, it will invariably be transformed - even subverted. Perhaps English will fragment into different languages as Latin fragmented into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and other languages 1,500 years ago.