re: #76 wheat-dogg, raker of forests, master of steam

I suspect SF writers will turn out to be prescient, and the future common language will be amalgamation of English, Spanish and Chinese, with other useful words throw in as needed. At this point in history, though, English has primacy, courtesy of the British Empire and American dominance since WWII. Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish and Arabic have many, many speakers each, but not worldwide influence - yet.

Yep. I think also that alphabet-based languages will have some advantage. (This neither here nor there, but some of my Chinese students have raised eyebrows when I explain that coinages for things like “democracy” and “human rights” came into Chinese from Japan during the Meiji period—they like to think the flow is one way.)