Most of the world thought that this battle ended about 50 years ago, when America emerged as the new superpower and its language became the normal medium of communication. English had been gaining ground on French since Britain replaced France as the reigning superpower over a century before that, and the rise of the United States of America pretty well settled the issue. Except in France.

It?s hard losing an advantage that your country has enjoyed for a long time ? Americans would also dislike it if they had to learn French or Chinese in order to be understood when they travel abroad ? but the French just went into denial about it. Some 97 per cent of students in France study English at some point, but there is little official pressure to learn it well, and the French lag well behind their German, French and Spanish neighbours in their command of English. This has a serious effect on France?s ability to compete in international business, and the commission was merely suggesting a remedy.

Useful technique

Foolish commission. They should have known. Politicians and intellectuals queued up to denounce them as defeatist in the French media. The dominance of English is merely a transitory thing, they argued ? Jacques Myard, a member of parliament announced: ?English is the most spoken language today, but that won?t last.? Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Spanish would become increasingly important, he predicted.

Is this just wishful thinking, or is it really the shape of the future? No language has ever risen to become the regional or global lingua franca without having a lot of speakers and a powerful state behind it. But once a language has achieved that dominant position, it is such a useful device for international intercourse that it doesn?t necessarily fall into disuse when the power of its original speakers declines. A thousand years after Rome was overrun by barbarians, educated Europeans were still using Latin to communicate.

The US does not face the fate of Rome, but will have much less share in the world economy in 50 years? time. Other economies are growing much faster, especially in Asia. If there is more business to be done, many more foreigners will take the trouble to learn Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish ? and Portuguese, Russian and Indonesian ? than do so at the moment. But nobody is going to learn them all: everybody will still need a common language, and it will still be English.

One world

Over the past 20 years, the switch to English as the first foreign language taught in schools has accelerated worldwide. In former communist countries of eastern Europe it has replaced Russian, and in Russia itself English is now obligatory in schools. More recently, it has been made compulsory in Chinese schools. To the intense irritation of the French, it has even become the de facto working language of the European Union.

A globalized world needs a common second language so that Peruvians can talk to Chinese and Hungarians can communicate with Ethiopians. It is an accident of history that the dominant global power was English-speaking at the time when this need became apparent, but the investment that millions of people have already made in learning the language guarantees that this accident will have permanent results.