There are several reasons why there is absolutely no progress in the discussion about English. The language is unmistakably still on the rise in international culture: worldwide more and more people are learning the language. And as a language becomes more attractive for learners when more people speak it – the investment of learning a language gives better returns if you can speak to more people around the world, read more magazines, etc.

At the same time, a world in which everybody is forced to speak English might be the ideal world for very few people on an international scale. There is something disturbing about the fact that everybody but a small minority of the world’s population – those living in the anglophone world – have to spend many years learning the language. And when we realize that this means that many parts of the world get more and more cultured on the anglophone sphere as the only example of international culture, we may realize that something is going wrong.

All of this is happening in many places of the world, and as far as I can see it is also discussed in many media – but typically in a national scale. And in many cases, this means that the whole thing is discussed as if what is happening is typical for the language area or the language in which it is discussed: oh we, Germans, Koreans, Swedes, etc., we are the laughing stock of the world, since we are so much influenced by English. This just shows how weak our culture is. Other places do so much better than us.