Monti’s Trojan Horse, Pichai’s Progress and the English Cosmopolis

If aliens conquered the earth and decided to give their colony a new constitution, in what language would they draft it? If you didn’t say ‘English’, I bet you are just that humble alien who is yet to visit planet earth. You don’t need to be as intelligent as an alien anyway to know that speaking in English is the best option if your audience includes the entire humanity. Some humans don’t know English, but they surely know somebody or the other who does. Aided by the internet, English has turned out to be such a linguistic Big Bang that the question to ask is no longer whether or not your lives are touched by English, but to what degree it is, or how soon it will be.

No, this is more than a restatement of the obvious, or another invocation of the ‘universal language’ myth. This is the developing…