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There are reasons for believing that the English increase will far surpass others, and that the diffusion of the United States will ultimately produce the general population of America.

With the United States in slow long-term decline, how will that affect the position of English? And where will all that leave monolingual Britain? Our political leaders like to boast about how global Britain is, but when it comes to languages, it is near the bottom of the global league, together with another island state, Japan.

A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread.

Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.

I love English, though I now call it 'Anglo- American' because we no longer speak British English due to globalization and America's economic power.

The air of the English is down-to-earth. They care about details; there's a tradition, but there's also a counter-culture: the younger generation versus the older generation and so on. But then that's well blended into a happy balance and crystallised into common sense.

What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

Country has become too homogenized and too commercial. It has lost what makes it special. It's great that it's popular, but then it starts to become watered down.

Instead of this confusion, we need the unifying force of an official language, English, which is the language of success in America.