Quite an entertaining & illuminating series of videos about the history of English here:

3rdblade:Quite an entertaining & illuminating series of videos about the history of English here:

Haha! If more knowledge was dispensed in such an interesting manner, the world would be a better place for it.

Thumbs up to Open U, thanks 3rdBlade!

Tutbonegega ligilo!

Nice video. I laughed hardest at the clitoris joke

The last part was handy to know as fodder for the 'Everyone should just speak English' camp.

Leke:The last part was handy to know as fodder for the 'Everyone should just speak English' camp.

"It probably shouldn't be called English at all, and if it does get a new name it'll probably be in Chinese".

Very fun

Some crazy stuff: Jay Walker on the world's English mania

2:04 min: "... China will be become the world largest English speaking country ...".

qwertz:Some crazy stuff: Jay Walker on the world's English mania

2:04 min: "... China will be become the world largest English speaking country ...".

I haven't even gotten to watching the video yet, too busy hanging around the comments section

(EDIT: after having watched the video, and read the comments, many are taking what he says the wrong way I think. The man's merely speaking it as it is, he's not saying that "english is better" or "other languages suck". I can understand why some might feel like the domination of English is evil and anti-cultural or something like that, but that's a very hyped and unrealistic opinion - Mr Walker does however have bad word choices and comparisons, comparing English to electricity )

I did write this though about the idea that countries that are most wealthy and powerful have their language chosen as the international language (I won't post his comment here for privacy reasons).

My response:
Not so much the country but the culture. Since English is the representative language of modern western culture, which is more popular, it gets the most "votes", just as Arabic does in the middle east. The history is very important too. China is an incredibly powerful country, yet only china and the chinese diaspora really speak chinese, because there's no historically ingrained cultural incentive to learn it in most of the world. On the contrary for Latin there still is.

What do you all think?
And who's with me for bringing back Sumerian or ye olde Greek as the "world" language ?