What is happening to English today? And what will happen to it next? Just a few years ago, with the internet linking the world and globalization catching on, with the burgeoning of the English language novel from non-English speaking countries, these questions would have seemed like the murmurings of a neurotic doubter. For the middle-class Indian, smug in his privileged knowledge of the language of his erstwhile colonial masters, the predominance of English among world languages could not even be questioned. But changes, not in the status of English, but in the uses it was being put to, where it was being used and by whom, have been taking place for a while now. Mr David Graddol, a British applied linguist, says in English Next that the fact that more people than ever before want to learn English is ?closely tied to the complex processes of globalization?, which would make the future of English ?more closely tied to the future of globalization itself?.

His work uncovers the complicated, shifting and open-ended equations that underlie this apparently simple statement. English is the global language. But economic and demographic drivers of language use and spread are throwing up beside it other languages, such as Mandarin, Spanish and Arabic, spoken most often by multilingual people. The change of perspective on English in the world has particular relevance to India, which Mr Graddol sees as one of the determinants in the future of the language. The democratic system, full of flaws in its implementation, still works slowly towards the broad-basing of education and the creating of pockets of upward mobility. English is the desired language in India, because the internal politics of language here resists unqualified domination by any one tongue, even Hindi. So there is, as Mr Graddol points out, ?another story unfolding?, that of complex patterns of linguistic, economic and cultural power in regional clusters within and beyond the immediate context of globalization.

The implications of this in India are dizzying. The circulation of people, into, out of, and around the country, upwards through the social scale and laterally across it, is causing great changes in the way English is used. The attraction of English as the only ?useful? language to know is undercut by the hold-all quality of Indian English ? and there is not one of that either ? which absorbs words, expressions and verbal gestures from indigenous languages regionally determined, from techno-jargon as well as from an easily accessible vision of American smartness gathered from television. English alone no longer functions as the principle of cultural, social or economic exclusion; already there are too many factors at work with it, creating other kinds of group codes. Global English does not seem to be evolving a homogeneous look.