The last lingua franca: English until the return of Babel

[...]Chs. 10-12 in Part 4, "Who's in charge here?," explore the future. [...]Ch. 12 explores several possible outcomes for English and predicts that by the middle of the twenty-first century further development of translation technology will enable direct global communication using the speakers' vernacular possible without the aid of a lingua franca. Ostler's colorful world language career--study of Latin and Sanskrit, research and teaching in various countries, activities to save endangered languages, and machine translation projects for an EU commission--is synthesized and crystallized in this book, making his seemingly provocative thesis convincing.