A third of the seven billion people in the world speak English, with just 400 million of them as a first language. There have been sixty to seventy new Englishes that have emerged in the last fifty years alone, and the ‘lingua franca’ in Europe is emerging as another English too. For sure. Can the world’s most acquisitive and adaptable communications tool just keep growing? The linguistics guru plays with the cultural misunderstandings and the huge gains that come in internationally when people from different cultures communicate fluently in the global language.
