@Russel - while I'm sure to get crucified by Esperanto speakers I always thought that, given the "origins", the strong grammatical bias towards Romance languages and a vocabulary that draws almost exclusively from the Indo-Germanic language families, Esperanto was flawed to begin with and an extremely half-arse attempt at a "global language" =}

/me ducks and covers

There was an attempt to make a universal language called Esperanto. I believe this happened in the 1890’s. It never really took hold. It seems that English will remain the lingua Franca for the foreseeable future.

There is a difference between English and the earlier lingua francas in that English is much more widely spoken. It's not just the language for a small elite engaged in business, science, diplomacy etc. It's how ordinary French and Germans talk to each other when they vacation in Spain.

I'm also curious about Irene's comment that English is a big threat to other languages. Obviously it has wiped out a lot of languages in the relatively small places where English is native, but is it really threatening other languages where it is a second language? When I think of language extinction, I think of Mandarin and Hindi, not English.

I don't think that another native language will replace English, but that world English will continue to evolve away from native English towards "Earth". A big part of that evolution will be adding more and more vocabulary from Asia. But it will take a while.

Nothing stays the same forever. There will come a time when English is replaced, possibly by a language that has not even evolved yet. But I think it is so firmly entrenched for now that I don't think it will be in my lifetime