Tom replies:

> For a somewhat contrary view, please see
>  http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/11/wallraff.htm
>
>  in which the author claims that "English isn't managing to sweep all else
>  before it -- and if it ever does become the universal language, many of
>  those who speak it won't understand one another"

Actually, I didn't find all that much in the article that disagreed with the
basic premise, although I enjoyed it greatly. The author recapitulated many
of the same facts that I did and came to many of the same conclusions.

What she did say was that the likelihood of the eventual evolution a common
world language isn't likely to be a simple linear path, and I certainly have
no argument with that.

The most important statistic she gave was the corollary to what I wrote, that
those countries that speak English, even as a second language, are growing
increasingly richer than those that don't. The high correlative event to the
acquisition of that wealth is that their populations are shrinking far faster
than the rest of the world.

The single most important aspect of reigning in the world's population
explosion is the attainment of educational and economic freedom for women. If
they have that, populations "crash", simply because women are not chained to
childbirth.

The United States continues to grow in population only because of its liberal
immigration policy, but if it depended on "native" births, the US's
population growth rate would be as negative as it is in Japan, Singapore,
Germany and Italy. And, now for the first time in history, these decreasing
populations will only serve to make these nations all the more wealthy, not
only on a per capita basis, but on an absolute one as well.

Wirt Atmar