A Comprehensive grammar of the English language

English is generally acknowledged to be the world's most important language. It is perhaps worth glancing briefly at the
basis for that evaluation. There are, after all, thousands of different languages in the world, and each will seem uniquely
important to those who speak it as their native language, the language they acquired at their mother's knee. But there
are more objective standards of elative importance. One criterion is the number of speakers of the language. A second
is the extent to which a language is geographically dispersed: in how many continents and countries is it used or is a
knowledge of it necessary? A third is its functional load: how extensive is the range of purposes for which it is used? In
particular, to what extent is it the medium for highly valued cultural manifestations such as a science or a literature? A
fourth is the economic and political influence of the native speakers of the language.

If we restrict the first criterion to native speakers of the language, the number of speakers of English is more than 300
million, and English ranks well below Chinese (which has over three times that number of speakers). The second criterion,
the geographical dispersal of the language, invites comparison with (for example) Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic as
languages used in major world religions, though only Arabic has a substantial number of speakers. But the spread of
English over most of the world as an international language is a unique phenomenon in the world's history: about 1500
million people -over a third of the world's population -live in countries where English has some official status or is one of
the native languages, if not the dominant native language. By the third criterion, the great literatures of the Orient spring to
mind, not to mention the languages of Tolstoy, Goethe, Cervantes, and Racine. But in addition to being the language of the
still more distinguished Shakespeare, English leads as the primary medium for twentieth-century science and technology.
The fourth criterion invokes Japanese, Russian, and German, for example, as languages of powerful, productive, and
influential nations. But English is the language of the United. States, whose gross domestic product in 1980 was more than
double that of its nearest competitor, Japan. No claim has here been made for the importance of English on the grounds of
its quality as a language (the size of its vocabulary, its relative lack of inflections, the alleged flexibility of its syntax). The
choice of an international language, or lingua franca, is never based on linguistic or aesthetic criteria but always on political,
economic, and demographic ones.