@ <a ui-sref="user({id:comment.commenter_obj.id})" href="https://www.italki.com/user/1271883" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Dan Smith</a>

There is already something like that, a sort of international English. It will be interesting to see how the English language develops in the European scenario, though, after Brexit is completed and the UK finally leaves, since then you'll have a union whose de facto language is english while pretty much no one will have it as a native language (some say "Brussels english" is already quite different form "native english"- and while Ireland will remain in the EU it is not big enough to set the rules on how it will be used in the continent, it seems).

Now, on the question: I've written a notebook entry on this subject, and my opinions are still the same: English will continue to be the most important global language, with its position only strengthened by the rise of India and English-speaking Africa. Spanish will lose a bit of relative importance, since it has few speakers outside of either Europe or Latin America (and I feel it will eventually die off in the States or at least become immensely less important, as did Italian, German etc before it). Portuguese and French, I think, will be the two European languages to grow the most, since they have immense numbers of speakers in Africa (specially French), and as for Asian languages, I think they will remain, at most, regionally important. Hindi will only become a major language if India decides to stop using English when dealing with the world and among themselves (as a national unity language).

Japanese, Farsi, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Turkish and other national languages don't have a strong position in the world, and even if the language of the poorer countries becomes more important as they develop, they'll can never compete with the real major languages (besides Japan and Korea are soon facing major democraphic bombs). So we have Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, Russian and German left: if Russia manages to become a major power, than RUssian will grow, but I don't think they can do so before Africa and Asia rise and so they will at most be an important regional and a secondary world language. German is probably past its peak, although in a better position than Japanese and Russian because of the demographic issue, of being an European Latin alphabet based language. Arabic will probably grow a lot, but how much it can compete with the established major languages is still and issue and will depend on how much the regions where it is a native langauge can develop and solve their own internal issues. Bahasa Indonesia is in a great position to become a major regional language, but there is not much really going on for it to become an international language.

As with Chinese... it is hard to say, but I'd guess it will be more or less like Japanese in the eighties: a lot of people will say they want to learn it, some people will start studying it, but only very few people will acquire fluency and China will mostly conduct its business overseas in English, French and Spanish.