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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 [...]

As economic (and other forms of) power shifts from the US and western Europe to China, will English retain its status as a global language of commerce and politics? According to a recent New Yorker article, there are hundreds of millions of potential new English speakers and learners. This creates not only new potentialities of [...]