[coldtea]

And in other centuries they were in French (the language of diplomacy), Latin, and Greek. Things change, and now is not the best time for the US empire (and UK has lost its imperial reach decades ago) -- so the "common" language could change too in 50-100 years.

[Creationer]

The cultural, scientific, and commercial works that have been created in English in the past 100 years dwarf anything created in French or Latin by a gigantic order of magnitude.

Why would we possibly switch to anything else, and lose 'access' to all that? All of the greatest movies and TV shows, the millions of scientific articles, the music, the computer code... English will never lose its position because of the amount of value that has been created with it.

How could English ever possibly change (in the way that Latin morphed into the various European languages after the fall of the Roman Empire), when we have access to perfect digital copies of how it is spoken and written?

[coldtea]

>The cultural, scientific, and commercial works that have been created in English in the past 100 years dwarf anything created in French or Latin by a gigantic order of magnitude.

I beg to differ. Compared to the Latin and French corpus, the body cultural works created in English is paltry and subpar. And that's the British ones, American ones, even less so. I can give you scientific and commercial if you feel any better.

>Why would we possibly switch to anything else, and lose 'access' to all that? All of the greatest movies and TV shows, the millions of scientific articles, the music, the computer code...

Yeah, pop music, movies, and TV shows. We'd lose Happy Days, I love Lucy, Breaking Bad, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, and Kanye West. OK, and Melvin and Henry James and Hemingway. Not much loss.

We would still have Racine, Rousseau, Rabelais, Rimbaud (and that's just part of the R).

Plus, all the huge variety and masterpieces of the peoples of the earth, before American commercial monoculture and its marketing power ate everything else.