Re: The chain-of-dialects

In this discussion of language, you've only included the US and Europe. Is that because you don't see any of the other language families as presenting a viable challenge to English?

The topic of language replacement is not entirely off-topic to this list. In the case of English, we have a paradigm for 'elite dominance'. Elite dominance in terms of language is not necessarily conquest. Rather it is the adoption of one language over another because the elite language is the more useful. To state it baldly, being fluent in an elite language gives you quantifiable economic benefits. At the simplest, it lets you haggle directly with the elite-language-speaking merchant, instead of having to pay a middleman.

If an elite language maintains its elite status over time, it may totally replace the original language, as Greek displaced Pelasgian, as Arabic has displaced Coptic in Egypt and Aramaic everywhere else, and as Latin-Romance displaced all other languages (save Basque) in Iberia, France and Italy. But a very long period of bilingualism seems the rule before such a thing happens.

At present, no other language presents any real competition to English as the 'world language'. I don't see English replacing any national languages for a long time yet, but eventually, something like this will probably happen.

Mark.