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Bartelby.com has the full text of Mencken’s The American Language online. I found the chapter on English as a world language especially interesting for its mix of prescience mixed with some strange 19th century thinking (courtesy of Otto Jespersen) on English’s supposed vitality due to its relative “masculinity” (meaning: laconic, gnomic utterances with clearly defined hard consonants apposed with easily distinguished soft ones, its increasingly simple grammar, etc. ), and some genuine American pride in our national tendency toward blithe monlingualism. Global English for Mencken (writing in 1921) is apparently a sign of the dominance of its “race” (his word). But the popularity of English in quickly industrializing China (see previous post) could also be a (cause? result? correlation?) of China’s current and future economic dominance.